Seal of the United States Department of Education

The U.S. government is divided into 3 interrelated branches; each with some degree of power over the other 2 branches in a system of checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power: the Executive branch, the Judicial Branch and the Legislative Branch.

The Executive branch consists of the President, the Vice President; the Secretary of State, the various Federal Executive Departments; also referred to as the Cabinet; NASA, the Postmaster General, the EPA, the CIA and a few others. The cabinet officials are appointed by the president with the guidance and consent of the senate; one of the two bodies of Congress; another branch of the U.S. government. Congressional consent of Presidential appointments is an example of the checks and balances in place purported to prevent abuse of power from any one branch. Aside from the president and vice president, the Executive is the non-elected division of government, appointed by the president and serving at the president’s pleasure. There are 15 State Departments, each headed by an official referred to as a Secretary: State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veteran’s Affairs and Homeland Security.

Insignia for the D.O.J.

In the United States, the Attorney General is the head of the United States Department of Justice and the chief lawyer for the country. They are responsible for all law enforcement and legal matters. The A.G. is a member of the president’s cabinet, appointed by the president and serves at the president’s pleasure. They, along with the Postmaster General are the only cabinet members not to have the title of Secretary.

The A.G. is 7th in line for the presidency should something happen to the Vice President, Speaker of the House, President of the Senate, Secretary of State, Secretary of Treasury, or the Secretary of Defense.

Your entire digestive system.

Your stomach is located at the end of your esophagus and is the terminus for swallowed food and drink. The stomach receives chewed food and continues to mechanically and chemically break it down into smaller pieces, creating more surface area for your small intestine to absorb nutrients.

Your stomach is an acidic environment with a low pH of between 1 and 3. Parietal cells in the wall of the stomach secrete hydrochloric acid (HCl). If your esophageal sphincter; basically the lid to your stomach; isn’t closed properly, HCl will creep into your esophagus resulting in heartburn. HCl has a few different jobs. One, is to kill bacteria or other potentially dangerous pathogens you may have unknowingly ingested with your food. Another is to convert pepsinogen into pepsin. Pepsinogen is released from chief cells in your stomach wall. HCl, chemically changes pepsinogen into pepsin and is essential because pepsin doesn’t function in an environment with a pH greater than 5. Pepsin begins protein digestion by breaking it down into peptide chains. Peptide chains are made up of amino acids. Your small intestine absorbs amino acids into your circulatory system for distribution to the rest of your body. It is important to note there is a layer of mucus protecting your stomach from being chemically broken down by pepsin and HCl.

Parietal cells of stomach wall

Parietal cells in your stomach wall also secrete intrinsic factor; a substance whose only job – as far as scientists know – is to facilitate the absorption of  vitamin B-12.  Intrinsic factor cannot do its job in the acidic environment of your stomach; it works best in a pH of 7 – close to water – but is used later in your ileum to absorb vitamin B-12 into your circulatory system after bile from your gallbladder has neutralized the acidic chyme (what your partially digested food is called when it enters your small intestine). B-12 is vital for your red blood cells to carry oxygen. People who lack intrinsic factor, cannot absorb vitamin B-12 and suffer from pernicious anemia.

Chymosin, or rennin, is secreted by the chief cells in your stomach wall and is responsible for the breakdown of a specific peptide bond: phenylalanine and methionine, through a complicated chemical process that I won’t detail here. Interestingly, rennin is the active ingredient in rennet which is used the cheese production; compelling some vegetarians into eating cheese without rennet.

Gastric lipase (“lip” means fat and “ase” means breakdown) is secreted by the chief cells to begin fat digestion in your stomach by hydrolyzing (“hydro” means water and “lyzing” means breaking apart; so the breaking apart of a molecule using water) fat molecules into fatty acid chains. Further fat digestion happens in the small intestine with the addition of pancreatic lipase.

G-cells in the wall of your stomach secrete gastrin, a hormone responsible for stimulating the release of HCl from the parietal cells. Gastrin is a chemical messenger that travels in your bloodstream and is released when your stomach is distended from having recently eaten, or when directed to be released by your brain in response to the sight or smell of food. Gastrin stimulates the release of HCl and pepsinogen. It enhances the strength of your stomach contractions to aid in mechanical digestion and causes the pyloric sphincter to relax or contract, controlling movement of chyme that moves into duodenum, the first segment of the small intestine. Your duodenum can only process a certain amount of chyme at a time, so your pyloric sphincter opens and closes to allow small packets of chyme to enter at regular intervals.

In summary, your stomach breaks your food into smaller pieces and mixes it with all of the above secretions in mechanical digestion. Parietal cells secrete hydrochloric acid and intrinsic factor. Chief cells secrete pepsinogen, chymosin and gastric lipase. Mucus cells secrete mucus to protect the stomach wall from the acidic chyme. Gastrin is the hormone responsible for mobilizing the whole process.

The cecum is the small sac that connects to the ileum of the small intestine to the ascending colon. Chyme is the mostly digested food matter that enters the cecum from the small intestine. 90% of digestion has already taken place. The colon has no digestive enzymes, but positive intestinal bacteria called gut flora and mucus are added to the chyme to form feces. At this point, your body will reclaim water and vitamins; essentially concentrating the feces before it exits the body. Note; when you have watery poop, your colon is not reabsorbing water and vitamins from the feces; the last step in digestion is being skipped. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to stay hydrated when you have diarrhea.

One type of gut flora - Candida albicans

Now, a word about dietary fiber. We are constantly reminded to eat lots of fiber for colon health. But why? The bacteria in your large intestine consume the largely undigested fiber for their own sustenance, and give off acetate, propionate and butyrate as waste products which the cell lining of the large intestine uses as nutrients. It really is amazing how efficient our bodies are; the 3 R’s to the extreme.

What can go wrong?

Colitis (“col” is colon and “itis” means inflammation), not matter what the cause is a swelling of the large intestinal wall. It can caused by autoimmune processes, idiopathic (of unknown cause), vascular (an interruption of blood flow to a portion of the intestine), infectious (as is the case with clostridium difficile and e coli), or caused by parasites.

Hereditary or other causes of colorectal cancer affect approximately 7% of U.S. citizens.

Crohn’s disease is an autoimmune disorder where the body attacks the colon wall, causing colitis.

Major elements of the urinary system

The urinary bladder, as it is referred to anatomically to distinguish it from meaning “pouch or flexible enclosure”, sits atop your pelvic floor: protective layers of muscles and connective tissues designed to hold you internal organs in place. The bladder is the final internal destination for urine that has been collected and concentrated by the kidney and transported via the ureters – one for each kidney.

The urinary bladder; like the design of many other internal surfaces of your body, like the small intestine and the stomach is lined with folds of tissue. In the stomach and bladder, these folds are called rugae and they stretch and flatten in response to increased pressure – if you have just eaten a big meal or haven’t urinated in a long time. Our wonderful bodies follow this design because internal bladder expansion takes the pressure off the surrounding pelvic and abdominal organs. In contrast, if the bladder filled outwards like a balloon, our pelvic and abdominal muscles would be continually squashed.

We start feeling the urge to pee when our bladder is about 25% full. For most people; this pretty easy to ignore. Nerves on and near our bladder, when stretched, trigger the parasympathetic nervous system (the rest and digest part of our nervous system as opposed to the sympathetic fight or flight part of our nervous system) to signal us to go pee. As the bladder stretches, the PNS becomes more insistent that we go pee. If the bladder reaches 100% capacity you will expel urine involuntarily. The flow of urine is controlled by two muscles; an internal involuntary muscle called the detrusor muscle and an external voluntary Kegel muscle.

OK, a brief aside to explain involuntary and voluntary muscle: involuntary muscles are controlled directly by our nervous system without conscious input from us. They are made up of smooth muscle fibres. Skeletal muscle, under our voluntary control is also regulated by our nervous system, but we are the ones sending the signals to the brain to move or not move. Skeletal muscle is striated. Microscopically, they look very different from each other. Smooth muscles are working away in your body all the time; like for example, in your small intestine as the smooth muscles push food along the digestive tract towards the large intestine (or colon) and out the anus.

Kegel muscle a.k.a. the Pubococcygeus muscle

It is our voluntary muscle we contract to “hold pee in” You can strengthen this muscle by doing Kegel exercises – for women, flexing the little ring of muscles, inside your vaginal opening. Doing about 25 flexes of this muscle every day well help to prevent urinary incontinence problems when you are older. Men also have a Kegel muscle that allows their penis to stay erect, and controls their ejaculation and of course, help with incontinence. Men can isolate and strengthen this muscle by stopping and starting the flow when urinating. This is the same for women.

What can go wrong? Well it all boils down to incontinence, but for many different reasons. If you have damaged nerves, you may not be able to receive the PNS’s signals urging you to urinate as is the case with some Parkinson’s and Multiple Sclerosis patients. Your detrusor muscle (involuntary) is controlled by the PNS. If your PNS is damaged, this muscle may not function properly, and the only protection you have is your external muscle; which is likely not strong enough to hold back small outputs of urine. Prostate cancer can damage pelvic nerves resulting in incontinence.

Sometimes (mostly in women), if you laugh, sneeze or cough, the pressure it creates overcomes both sets of muscles resulting in little spurts of urine coming out. This is called Stress Incontinence and happens mostly in older women – over the age of 60, but can happen younger; say if you have a genetic predisposition to urinary incontinence.

Overactive bladder is diagnosed when you have to pee 8 or more times a day, and are up 1 or 2 times a night. Based on this definition approximately 1 in 6 people in the U.S. have this problem. OAB can be treated with antimuscarinic drugs or through a really cool sounding procedure whereby physicians insert an electrode near the tibial nerve in your leg. An electrical impulse travels to your sacral plexus via your tibial nerve. Recall, that your tibia is a bone in your lower leg. Your sacral plexus is a bundle of nerve fibers responsible for controlling parts of your pelvis and lower extremities. The treatment takes place once a week for 12 weeks. Some patients need more or ongoing treatment. I myself have an overactive bladder, but it doesn’t badly interfere with my life – excepting 11 hour long bus rides in Central Turkey with only one bathroom stop; I have just lived with it without treatment. Please understand, I am not a medical professional and I am not advocating any procedure or treatment, but just seek to educate people about our bodies and how they work. Peace out.

Scene from Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace

Foreshadowing is a device used in writing to elude to a future event. It is a tool writers use to  give a hint about what will happen later in the story. The best way to understand foreshadowing is use universally well known stories as examples.

In the Boy Who Cried Wolf, every time he cried “wolf” to draw the townspeople to his aid, they warned him that one day there would be a real emergency, and no one would help him because they wouldn’t know if he was joking or in real need. In the end, the wolf got the sheep because the boy’s multiple pranks destroyed their trust; thus confirming their fears.

In a horror movie, when the protagonists are frightened by something suddenly jumping out at them that turns out to be a benign object, but later are brutally killed by an axe murderer jumping out at them, the benign object gives the watcher a clue about later happenings in the movie.

The Star Wars saga are absolutely riddled with examples. In Star Wars, when Ben Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker that his father was killed by Darth Vader, he was both eluding to a future conflict and speaking metaphorically about Anaken Skywalker’s “death” and rebirth as Darth Vader. In the Phantom Menace, we see young Anaken’s shadow shaped like Darth Vader’s profile, eluding to his eventual change. For more information on the Star Wars Saga, check out the Lucas Film website.

The thyroid produces T3 and T4; triiodothyronine and thyroxine for those of you who like wordy words as well as calcitonin. As their name suggests, both T3 and T4 use iodine, and their numbers refer to how many iodine molecules are attached to the structure. Detailed and easy to understand information about the thyroid is hard elusive and I find myself having to refer to my anatomy and physiology textbooks to provide the best answer. Your thyroid has two different kinds of follicle cells – cells that secrete hormones: follicular cells and parafollicular cells. Your follicular cells produce T3 and T4.

Your pituitary gland is located in your brain and secretes, among other things Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (if it is a stimulating hormone, it comes from your pituitary gland). TSH tells your thyroid to make T3 and T4 which travel to every cell in your body and stimulate those cells to produce protein or increase oxygen usage.

The thyroid’s parafollicular cells produce calcitonin which decreases the amount of circulating calcium in your blood. To help you remember this, think “calcitonin tones down the body’s calcium.” Your body does this by storing the excess calcium in your bones, and interestingly, calcitonin contributes to us no longer feeling hungry. There are times also, when you need to increase the amount of circulating calcium. The parathyroid glands that sit atop the thyroid secrete parathyroid hormone to stimulate our bone cells to release calcium, by stimulating our kidney to reabsorb calcium in the process of urine concentration, and stimulates our small intestine to absorb more calcium from the food we eat via Vitamin D. Essentially, the small intestine asks the kidney for a usable form of Vitamin D which enhances the absorption of calcium by the microvilli in your small intestine. The production of parathyroid hormone is not dependent upon a feedback loop with the pituitary gland in your brain. Sensors on the parathyroid gland themselves can measure the amount of circulating calcium in the blood.

There are lots of different disorders associated with the thyroid, but almost all of them break down into too little or too much thyroid hormone. The cause can be linked to a problem with the thyroid itself, or a problem with the hypothalamus or pituitary gland in your brain. Whatever the case, symptoms are similar.

Hypothyroidism is a deficiency of thyroid hormone. Although, as I stated, there are many causes, the most common cause is iodine insufficiency  (the introduction of iodized table salt into our collective diet has helped with this problem). Since T3 and T4 are responsible for cellular metabolism, our body doesn’t metabolize our food properly, nor does it get the boost in energy that increased oxygen production supplies; leading to weight gain, tiredness, cold intolerance, muscle cramps, joint pain, carpal tunnel syndrome,decreased sweating, brittle hair and nails , constipation and a low heart rate. Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is an autoimmune disorder that causes hypothyroidism, and ironically, the drug treatment for hypER thyroidism can cause hypothyroidism.

Hyperthyroidism in an excess of thyroid hormone that lead increases metabolism beyond a healthy level. This results in stimulating the body’s sympathetic nervous system (the getting ready for fight system fueled by adrenaline). This exhibits as fast heart beat, palpitations, tremor, anxiety, diarrhea and weight loss – not a good diet plan. Grave’s disease is the most common presentation of hyperthyroidism.

Free range chickens

Finding myself standing in front of a large, brightly lit cooler with dozens (pun intended) of packages of eggs to choose from, I am confounded by the difference between free range and free run eggs. In my lazy attempt to be a good consumer, I try to go for the one that subjectively sounds the best, and promise to go home and do my homework. I am sharing my results with you.

Free Range eggs are what we imagine in our minds; chickens, free to roam the great outdoors, spread their wings, eat grass and lay their eggs where they darn well feel like it. Free Run eggs are a modified version of this. They are raised in large barns where they have the freedom to roam about, are given access to the outside for an allotted period every day, and provided with nesting boxes in which to lay their treasure. By this definition, it seems, most hobby farmers with a few laying chickens produce Free Run eggs. Understandably, Free Range eggs are much more expensive to produce because spoilage is higher and more effort is needed to collect the eggs which are likely less uniform in size. Free Run eggs are slightly cheaper as the chickens are more tightly controlled.  Chickens in battery farms are tightly packed in with very little room to move; their eggs, once laid, are funneled down a conveyor belt to be processed in a big factory. This is the cheapest method; less manual labor, more automation, higher yields, more uniformity.

Consumers can become misled easily, into thinking that buying free run or free range eggs are healthier. The “free” part simply refers to the quality of the chicken’s life; while ethically important, doesn’t address the composition of the eggs, or the presence or absence of antibiotics, which is a huge issue. Antibiotics are a necessity on battery farms where disease can wipe out hundreds of chickens in one fell swoop. All chickens are routinely given antibiotics whether they need it or not leading to antibiotic resistant strains of disease that have huge implications for humans who are unknowingly ingesting antibiotics with their scrambled eggs. To avoid antibiotics, look on the label of the egg carton and it will say something like, “chickens were raised without antibiotics”. Another big issue in battery farms; and likely in some free run/free range farms is the growth hormones fed to the chickens. Typically, an unadulterated chicken will mature into egg laying around 10 to 12 months. Battery farmed chickens are finished their egg laying life by that time! Battery chickens only live around 2 years because their bodies are totally used up. Organs are forced into service before they are fully mature and their little bodies burn out fast. When a chicken is no longer able to lay eggs, it is sent to the poultry processing farm, then onto the supermarket for us to eat. To avoid this, look for labels that say grown without hormones or antibiotics. Just because your package says free range or free run, doesn’t automatically mean without growth hormones or antibiotics.

What about Omega 3 fatty acid? Eggs that contain high amounts of Omega 3 are laid by chickens who are fed 15-20% ground flax in their diet. This means that an Omega 3 chicken produces eggs with 10 times the amount of Omega 3 than their non-flax brethren. Omega 3 is a polyunsaturated fat is important for the healthy development of your brain, eyes and nerves, and many of us eating a western diet low in fish and other rich sources of this nutrient could use the little extra help that Omega 3 eggs can offer us.

In conclusion, free range and free run refer only to the conditions in which the chickens are raised and not to their nutritional content. If you would like eggs free of growth hormones and antibiotics, look for eggs that say this on the packaging. Also, be a little bit critical when you see “organic”. Many people take this to mean “no growth hormones or antibiotics”, but unless the package specifically states this, the term organic may simply mean that the chickens were given organic food to eat.

Red blood cells; the cells responsible for carrying oxygen to the body’s tissues, have a life span of about 4 months before the wear out. The monocytes in the spleen collect dying rbc’s and to recycle their constituents for use in the body. What can’t be recycled, is excreted by the kidneys and large intestine. Both urine and feces get their trademark colors, in part, from the waste products of red blood cells bilirubin and biliverdin. Monocytes are white blood cells that can either directly destroy dead red blood cells though a series of surface membrane chemical reactions or can differentiate into macrophages which resemble gobbling Pac-Men. Half of the body’s monocytes are stored in the spleen. Monocytes also travel through your body and migrate to damaged tissues when needed. Monocytes differentiate (mature) into macrophages to “eat up” dead cells, bacteria, or other waste products from damaged tissues.

Human Monocyte surrounded by red blood cells

The spleen’s monocytes are also responsible for eating up antibody coated bacteria and cells. Think of antibodies as little “please kill me” signs attached to the outside of cells. The body’s immune system has marked these antibody complexes for destruction. Monocytes will either ingest these complexes directly, or cause them to self destruct.

You can live without your spleen, but its absence will leave you more susceptible to infection. Splenectomy patients have a higher than average rate of death from pneumonia and a higher concentration of circulating monocytes – since their storage unit has been removed. Splenectomy patients also show a decreased response to some vaccinations. Without your spleen, you need to work harder to stay healthy to prevent disease.

The U.S. Secretary of State is the highest ranking Cabinet official and is appointed by the President of the United States. Although the Executive Branch of the government is appointed and serves at the pleasure of the President, its members must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate; one of the two elected branches of congress. The S.O.S. is fourth in line for the presidency should anything happen to the President, the Vice President of the Speaker of the House of Representatives (the other elected branch of the U.S.Congress).

The Secretary of State oversees and advises the President on U.S. foreign policy; serving the role equivalent of Foreign Ministry. In addition, the S.O.S. oversees all diplomatic relations with other countries; with the exception of some military endeavors. The S.O.S is responsible for protocol functions for the White House. Protocol can best be described as a set of international courtesy rules.

The Secretary of State is also keeper of the Great Seal of the United States, a device used to authenticate documents coming from the White House and as such, the S.O.S. is responsible for drafting proclamations and replies.

In the West Wing, the Secretary of State was  Arnold Vinick played by Alan Alda.