Some research has also shown that aged garlic extract can help reduce the amount of “soft plaque” in the arteries. Soft plaque is more likely to break off and cause a blockage that leads to a heart attack.
One small study, which involved 55 patients ages 40-75, tracked how the garlic supplement worked for a year. In the end, researchers found those who took the supplement saw an 80% reduction in soft plaque
“The results showed that aged garlic extract actually causes some regression, a little bit of less plaque,” Budhoff said. “Iit actually went away a little bit.”
“We have completed four randomized studies, and they have led us to conclude that aged garlic extract can help slow the progression of atherosclerosis and reverse the early stages of heart disease”
At that time, I followed the standard practices to address my plaque. By going with fasting and low-carb diets, I have been keeping my blood sugar, insulin, and HbA1c (hemoglobin A1c) at much better levels.
Moreover, I did extra changes to my lifestyle:
I started eating salmon every day (like 3 days per week) to get omega 3 oil.
I added niacin to improve my HDL, decrease my LDL, and decrease my triglycerides. Niacin is an over-the-counter supplement, and you get up to about 2 grams daily. So far, it’s the only thing that has a widespread effect on cholesterol values. While niacin is not believed to cause major changes, it did contribute something to my health.
As for blood pressure medications, I switched from ARB to an ACE inhibitor (Ramipril). Apart from decreasing blood pressure, ACE inhibitors also reduce inflammation. (And we just discussed what inflammation can do to your plaque.)
Most of my patients avoid statins due to side effects, but I “bit the bullet” and took a very low dose Crestor (rosuvastatin). I started with 5 mg. Once I got better control of my blood glucose with dietary carb control, I dropped my dosage to 2.5 mg Crestor two times per week. The lower dose also impacts inflammation by decreasing it; the lower dose doesn’t cause diabetes.
I have always been skeptical of using the low-code or no-code platforms. In the past two weeks, two use cases came up.
AppSheet
First, our company needs a time tracking tool. Even though my company plans to use Clockify for time tracking, I thought I’d try one of the no-code platform: AppSheet.
pro: I was able to develop and deploy a basic time tracking app on my phone in about 4 hours. It reads an Excel stored on my company’s network and build a starter app in a few minutes: one view to show all the time entries in the Excel, one view to view the details of an entry and another view to edit/add an entry. I spent the rest of the few hours to customize the app by changing settings of views or data properties(enum, editable, etc.)
con: I would like to make it a bit fancier: when user starts working on a project, she hits the start button to time the project. When she is done, she simply hits the stop button. This would be straightforward to do on any mobile app development framework(Ionic, Java/Android, Objective-C/iPhone), I found it very difficult to do in AppSheet.
PowerApps
The driver to try Microsoft’s Power Apps is to view DevOps work items on my mobile phone. What I want it to do is let me select a DevOps query to run, displays the work items and detail of a selected work item. I was able to complete majority of the development on a volleyball tournament over the President Day’s weekends.
pro: PowerApps is more flexible. You write code like Visual Basic. You can add a canvas. Add controls to the canvas. Modify a control’s properties to change its user interface. Or bind an action(e.g. OnSelect) to a function call(e.g. getting data or navigating to a different canvas), like what you do in Excel(e.g. sum() or average())
con: the action only allows one function call. You can’t write more than one line. It is by design so that PowerApps developer don’t need to write(and debug) a lot of code.
Conclusion
By no means, this is a thorough review of both platforms. But one take away is, like all platforms, they offer convenience by taking away some complexity of coding. However, this also takes away flexibility and power of coding. IMO, PowerApps strikes good balance of convenience and flexibility. They are great to develop simple applications.
I still don’t believe no-code or low-code should be used for enterprise application development, just because of the complexity and massive size of work. I don’t see how tens or hundreds of developers can develop the software collaboratively without overwriting each other’s work. Debugging is also problematic.
This is the best story about MVP(Minimum Viable Product). A good story for all the product managers or whoever manages scope of product releases.
If you don’t have time, watch the video around 6:30.
In short, Nvidia was running out of money. The first(?) chip RIVA 128 supports only 8 modes of the 32 blend modes specified in DirectX. Nvidia went out to all the game developers to convince them to not use the other 24 modes. “8 modes is all you need”. “if you want to make an explosion, you want to make transparent, could you do it this way? use that mode. just don’t use the other 24 modes.”