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Pot pouri

Well we've made it through the shortest day and now summer is just around the corner.

At least that's the way I try to convince myself that our brightest days are yet to come and things can only get better from here.

From a weather perspective that may not actually be the case this year because, if the media are to be believed, we are on the cusp of a mega-super-gigga-turbo-apocalyptic El Nino that threatens to turn us all to dust.

Yes, as is so often the case in the modern world where everything has to be sensationalised and hyped to the n'th degree in order to sell advertising, we've been warned that the entire planet is plunging headlong into a fiery abyss.

Cue Tui's ad.

Maybe things will be abnormally hot this summer -- they certainly seem to have been joyously mild so far this autumn and early winter. However, I can't help but get the feeling that so many of the looming "weather bombs" that we've been warned of actually ended up bing fizzers of late.

Never the less, what can we do to prepare for what *might* be an unusually hot spring, summer and autumn?

Not much actually.

The weather will be the weather and we have zero control over it. If the temperatures are going to soar into the 30s and beyond, that's just out of our control.

If there's going to be a paucity of rain then there's very little we can do about it -- we will just have to adapt.

One thing is for sure... the sooner we start anticipating the pain, the longer it will seem to last -- so let's just wait and see, shall we?

In other news, if you want to live longer a new study suggests that some of the things we thought were a huge factor in early deaths may be outweighed by things we thought were not so important.

Given that I know there are a lot of people my age (ie: very, very old) who read this column, I figured it might be important to share the results of this research with you.

Apparently Being Out Of Shape Is Far More Likely To Kill You Than Smoking so being fit and strong is a good idea.

Surprisingly, this study wasn't conducted by "The University of the bleeding obvious" but rather, by the University of Cambridge.

It seems that if you want to live longer you should get fitter and stronger, something that also involves consuming more protein in your diet.

Who would have thought?

Enough sarcasm... the interesting part of the study is not the factors themselves but the weight of those factors.

Apparently, not having a good level of cardiovascular fitness can hike your risk of death by some 400 percent and having insufficient strength (aka muscle-mass) by 200 percent. These are far more significant factors than smoking -- which raises the risk by a mere 50 percent.

Perhaps this explains why I am still alive, I seem to have done all three things right :-)

The study also indicates that present "recommended" levels of protein intake are insufficient for optimal longevity, having been established a long time ago to simply represent the bare minimum required to avoid deficiency-based disease.

Perhaps surprisingly, I'm not totally convinced that the current fad for extra protein in *everything* is a sensible one. I know that when I'm doing my regular shop at the supermarket I see the word "Protein" emblazend on everything from coffee to bread these days. I know that I seldom reach the new recommendation of 1.6g of protein per 1Kg of lean bodyweight in my diet and it doesn't seem to have hurt me any. I've got a lot of muscle for my age and would prefer to take care of my aging kidneys than be trying to get bigger through a boosted protein intake.

Speaking of supermarkets... we all like to grizzle about the price of butter so I was interested to read a post on social media the other day from someone who wondered why it is that Costco can sell NZ produced butter for so much less than our supermarkets do. Another person piped up with "economies of scale, Costco is a big company". That was shot down by others who pointed out that here in New Zealand, Costco is just a small player so if they can negotiate deals like that, why can't the Woolworths, Countdown and Pack n Save supermarkets run by NZ's shopping-cart cartel do the same?

Someone else suggested that Costco used NZ butter as a "loss leader" to get people in the store but even that doesn't seem to have much validity because it leaves me wondering why our duopoly supermarkets never seem to do the same and use butter as a loss-leader.

I think it's pretty obvious that Kiwi consumers are being ripped off to a high degree by our supermarkets simply because they lack true competition in most parts of the country. The government has even confirmed this with its own reports but to date, their response has been nothing more than to acknowledge the problem and say "we need more competition". That is not a solution.

Well that's it for another Monday when there really wasn't much happening on the tech wires.

Carpe Diem folks!

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