Wine Wednesday - Evo: 2009 Albariño

As it gets hotter and hotter in south Texas (we have hit the season of five straight months of 90 plus degree weather) I tend to prefer lighter, whiter wines. This weeks selection is also from our Wine Shop at Home Wine Club and was an Evo Albariño from California. The Albariño (means white grape from the Rhine) grape comes originally from the Spanish province of Galicia, and may have been brought there by Cluny monks in the 12th century and may be a variety of Riesling. However, as Riesling isn't known until the 15th century others have suggested the grape may related to the French grape Petit Manseng. An interesting anthropological exercise would be to trace the genetic history of grapes and see if you can tie it to the historical movement of people or events.

I mentioned the Evo winery in last weeks post. We paired the wine with a chicken stir fry with basmati rice and vegetables (mostly brocoli and carrots). The aroma of the wine is definitely fruity, mostly pears and maybe peaches. The taste was crisp and the acidity lingered a little bit after but overall a pretty enjoyable drink. I still think I prefer Reisling or Gewürztraminer but I would drink this over a Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc. I'll give it a 4.1 out of 5 on the international panthro wine scale.

Wine Wednesday - Evo: Cabernet Franc

The first thing you learn about wine, is that different countries have different ways of naming wine. Outside of Europe, the majority of wines are named after the majority grape in the bottle. In Europe the name refers to the region where the wine was produced. So Champagne refers to wine produced in the Champagne region of France and Chianti refers to a region in Italy. This allows these producers to use multiple grapes to produce a wine, although depending on climate and soil of the region.

Up this week, we have another bottle from our personal Wine Shop at home consultants wine club and comes from Evo winery in northern California. A $1 from each bottle sold goes to National Geographic to protect endangered species. This wine is a Cabernet Franc, which refers to a grape that is primarily used for blending Merlots and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in Bordeaux (the best French wine IMHO). The grape is a little lighter than its genetic cousin Cabernet Sauvignon and produces a slightly paler red wine. In the Americas, the use of different grapes beyond Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, etc. is becoming more prounounced as the national palette becomes more enriched. One of my favorite varietal types of red wines is Malbec, which is primairly produced in the Mendoza region of Argentina. This was my first bottle of Cabernet Franc though. We paired with pasta with a marinina sauce with green olives and capers.

The color was good, even if it was a little darker than I expected. The aroma is very earthy, like fresh tilled earth after a rain storm. The taste was a mixture of berries with a pretty sharp spicy aftertaste. So they are not far off in their description of the wine. This wine kind of grows on you a little bit, so overall for a first time experience it was pretty good. I would have prefered a little less spice though. I think I would give it a 4.2 out 5.

This 2008 EVO North Coast Cabernet Franc has aromas of cherry, wet leather, and moist tobacco with hints of spicy jalapeno and kiwi. The flavors are a ripe combination of the aromas with smooth acidity and mild tannin. The mouth-feel is medium to heavy with a nice roundness in the long fruit centric finish. Enjoy this wine with roasted pork chops, artichokes with aioli, portabella mushrooms or morbier cheese.

Friday Five #13: WNT, Fructose, Interpretation, BMI, and Parkinsons.

Here is this weeks top five. It has been crazy busy around here as I work on a number of things. I have to prepare a presentation, review some items, write some things, and do some analysis. Plus we have a hyper mobile almost 1 yr old who like to climb stairs and whatever she can get her back leg up on.


1) The Wnt Pathway Controls Cell Death Engulfment, Spindle Orientation, and Migration through CED-10/Rac: I may be the only person that finds this exciting but this biological pathway is really cool and it may relate to something I'm working on. Sorry for the cryptic nature but this is in the beginning stages. Here is the abstract and here is more on the pathway.

Wnt signalling pathways have extremely diverse functions in animals, including induction of cell fates or tumours, guidance of cell movements during gastrulation, and the induction of cell polarity. Wnt can induce polar changes in cellular morphology by a remodelling of the cytoskeleton. However, how activation of the Frizzled receptor induces cytoskeleton rearrangement is not well understood. We show, by an in depth 4-D microscopy analysis, that the Caenorhabditis elegans Wnt pathway signals to CED-10/Rac via two separate branches to regulate modulation of the cytoskeleton in different cellular situations. Apoptotic cell clearance and migration of the distal tip cell require the MOM-5/Fz receptor, GSK-3 kinase, and APC/APR-1, which activate the CED-2/5/12 branch of the engulfment machinery. MOM-5 (Frizzled) thus can function as an engulfment receptor in C. elegans. Our epistatic analyses also suggest that the two partially redundant signalling pathways defined earlier for engulfment may act in a single pathway in early embryos. By contrast, rearrangement of mitotic spindles requires the MOM-5/Fz receptor, GSK-3 kinase, and β-catenins, but not the downstream factors LIT-1/NLK or POP-1/Tcf. Taken together, our results indicate that in multiple developmental processes, CED-10/Rac can link polar signals mediated by the Wnt pathway to rearrangements of the cytoskeleton.

2) The bitter truth about fructose alarmism. Truthfully, there is nothing more frustrating than research on nutrition - it would appear it changes every couple of years and ends up contradicting itself. While there are parts I do agree with this post there are other that I find disturbing such as the points about fructose corn syrup and its insulin response.

3) On the Genetic Interpretation of Disease Data: The title is pretty self explanatory - so the authors should be rewarded for that alone.

Background

The understanding of host genetic variation in disease resistance increasingly requires the use of field data to obtain sufficient numbers of phenotypes. We introduce concepts necessary for a genetic interpretation of field disease data, for diseases caused by microparasites such as bacteria or viruses. Our focus is on variance component estimation and we introduce epidemiological concepts to quantitative genetics.

Methodology/Principal Findings

We have derived simple deterministic formulae to predict the impacts of incomplete exposure to infection, or imperfect diagnostic test sensitivity and specificity on heritabilities for disease resistance. We show that these factors all reduce the estimable heritabilities. The impacts of incomplete exposure depend on disease prevalence but are relatively linear with the exposure probability. For prevalences less than 0.5, imperfect diagnostic test sensitivity results in a small underestimation of heritability, whereas imperfect specificity leads to a much greater underestimation, with the impact increasing as prevalence declines. These impacts are reversed for prevalences greater than 0.5. Incomplete data recording in which infected or diseased individuals are not observed, e.g. data recording for too short a period, has impacts analogous to imperfect sensitivity.

Conclusions/Significance

These results help to explain the often low disease resistance heritabilities observed under field conditions. They also demonstrate that incomplete exposure to infection, or suboptimal diagnoses, are not fatal flaws for demonstrating host genetic differences in resistance, they merely reduce the power of datasets. Lastly, they provide a tool for inferring the true extent of genetic variation in disease resistance given knowledge of the disease biology.

4) The Predictive Value of Different Measures of Obesity for Incident Cardiovascular Events and Mortality: Most researchers outside public health will tell you BMI is a crappy predictor of obesity because it does not take into account muscle mass - so a NFL player may be 6'3" and have a high BMI but does that mean he is obese. This article does a good job of systematically dispelling the allure of BMI and offers alternatives that are just as easy to measure and may be more reliable features of obesity.

Context: To date, it is unclear which measure of obesity is the most appropriate for risk stratification.

Objective: The aim of the study was to compare the associations of various measures of obesity with incident cardiovascular events and mortality.

Design and Setting: We analyzed two German cohort studies, the DETECT study and SHIP, including primary care and general population.

Participants: A total of 6355 (mean follow-up, 3.3 yr) and 4297 (mean follow-up, 8.5 yr) individuals participated in DETECT and SHIP, respectively.

Interventions: We measured body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC), waist-to-height ratio (WHtR), and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) and assessed cardiovascular and all-cause mortality and the composite endpoint of incident stroke, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular death.

Results: In both studies, we found a positive association of the composite endpoint with WHtR but not with BMI. There was no heterogeneity among studies. The relative risks in the highest versus the lowest sex- and age-specific quartile of WHtR, WC, WHR, and BMI after adjustment for multiple confounders were as follows in the pooled data: cardiovascular mortality, 2.75 (95% confidence interval, 1.31–5.77), 1.74 (0.84–3.6), 1.71 (0.91–3.22), and 0.74 (0.35–1.57), respectively; all-cause mortality, 1.86 (1.25–2.76), 1.62 (1.22–2.38), 1.36 (0.93–1.69), and 0.77 (0.53–1.13), respectively; and composite endpoint, 2.16 (1.39–3.35), 1.59 (1.04–2.44), 1.49 (1.07–2.07), and 0.57 (0.37–0.89), respectively. Separate analyses of sex and age groups yielded comparable results. Receiver operating characteristics analysis yielded the highest areas under the curve for WHtR for predicting these endpoints.

5) US Parkinson's Rates Highest in Whites, Hispanics, and Midwest, Northeast: A good Science Daily article that looks at Parkinson. I wonder if anyone has looked at genetic susceptibility for this. .

Day 46: I'm on a diet (5/5/2008)

I really have no idea why Jennifer wants me to go on a diet. Truthfully, it is to support her.

Unconscious Anthropologist

Life does not suck, and neither does food, according to Anthony Bourdain. Most people know him as the host of the Travel Network show No Reservations, where Bourdain travels around sampling the world's cuisine including the fancy (foie gras), the stinky (durien fruit - smells so bad it is banned on airplanes), the bizarre (sheep's head), to the holy sh*5 he actually ate that (still beating heart of a cobra). He is probably the most palatable of the celebrity chefs. I just can't see Rachel Ray blowing chunks in a Russian alley, running naked into subzero lakes, or actually not liking one dish she tastes (just once I want her to complain about the service or send her food back

However, probably less known are Bourdain's writing skills. He was catapulted into the spotlight with his kitchen expose, Kitchen Confidential, where he outed the behind the scenes of most kitchens for what they really are, the last bastion of American machismo. Although I have always been amazed by his underlying anthropological skill, he seems to seamlessly blend cultural traits together with the common thread of food consumption, and the knowledge that best food comes from the poorest regions of a country. No where is on display better than in A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal. The book starts with a letter to his wife from the worst hotel in Cambodia, the place with questionable stains on the wall of the bathroom, undiscovered species of bugs on the floor, and still under the control of the Khmer Rouge who appear to have turned over new life and started a casino in Pailin. The 2nd chapter really demonstrates the power of his writing by examining his complex relationship with his brother on a reunion trip to France, this is really the genesis of Anthony Bourdain as a classically trained French Chef. This may also explain his fascination with Vietnam the subject of three chapters in the book. He also travels to Russia, Portugal, Morocco, Northern California, Japan, England, and Scotland. Wherever he goes he is all about the food and the people that make it. He dines in fancy restaurants but also food markets eating the street fare that everyone eats. In this action, he tells us more about the heart of a country in a few pages then most people do in a lifetime.

At times, Bourdain comes off as Hemingway meets Heart of Darkness in the age of globalization. He is the antithesis of the modern American, he smokes, he drinks, he eats high fat foods, chews red meat and doesn't care about his consumption of Omega 3s. This makes him an excellent ambassador to the world where the mere fact of survival in some parts is the best part of the day and the acts of living and eating are celebratory events. Bourdain's ability to ingest the food of some culture where most American would hurl, allows for some good will between countries in an era when that is disintegrating. Diet is a common thread in every culture and the diversity of it should be reveled in before the American franchises take over the world.