Recently posted by Teresa Fung

There will be a new group of bloggers in Fall, so this will be my last blog entry.

It was absolutely fun to share my random thoughts with you during this time. I hope you enjoyed reading them as well.

So, till we meet again sometime in some other context! In the mean time, I will leave you with my personal nutrition principles:
1. Minimally processed foods
2. Wide variety
3. Plant based diet

Be well!

A family of skunk has made a home in a hole between the foundation of my house and the garage. There is an adult and 7 little skunk children. (What is the name for children skunk?) They are actually quite cute.  Too bad I can't get a family portrait to post on this site. For the last few days at dusk, adult skunk (presumably mommy) would nudge the children out of the dwelling presumably to practice foraging themselves. Some children were more bold and some were very shy. For a couple of days, all they did were scurried right outside their home. And every little sound would create a stampede which the seven children fought their way to get inside their dwelling. Then adult skunk would try to coax them outside again.

Today, the children were more bold, They actually ventured over 5 feet from home! I watch my nightly "skunk show" from a window a few feet from their "door". A couple of nights ago, some skunk were spraying in the middle of the night. My husband joked that the skunk children must be fighting.

I practically started piano lessons along with starting school. When I was in the equivalent of junior high, I decided that I would like to play organ at church. One summer in high school, I took organ lessons behind the back of my piano teacher because I was afraid that she was going say that I could not pay adequate attention to both instruments and my piano studies would slack. Well, once school started again in Fall, I truly could not devote enough time to practice both instruments so I dropped the organ. Then I told my piano teacher. It turned out she was the director of the children's choir at my very own church. She already had another teenager as an organist but she recruited me to share the responsibilities. I was 15. She slowly eased me into the "job" by preparing me to play only one piece first, and then gradually let me play more. She was one of my best teachers.

Playing at church is very different from giving a recital because the organist is part of a bigger picture. One needs to be able to adjust quickly when things don't happen as planned (e.g. someone took too long to finish one part of the service, did something unexpected, etc). And one needs to work well as an accompanist (when the choir or soloist is singing something) or as the song leader to lead congregational singing. So it is important to have the ability to play music in an ensemble, some simple musical improvisation, and handle things such as what to do when the soloist sang a bunch of wrong notes.

As complicated as I have made it, it is actually not too difficult to acquire those skills. And it is a lot of fun!!!! Most organists started their musical training with the piano. So if you have decent piano skills, it is rather easy to learn the organ. The different chapters of the American Guild of Organist (www.agohq.org) host an event called Pipe Organ Encounter (POE, http://www.agohq.org/education/indexoutreach.html) for adults. It is a very nice program to introduce the organ. Or one can contact a big church in the area and ask if their organist gives lessons or recommend someone. For youth, there is a program call Pedals, Pipes and Pizza, a half day program.

And the last benefit of being a church organist? Money. Well, not a lot of it, but every bit helps in these days. Organists generally don't play for free. And many people use this as a second and part time job because it involves weekends and evenings (usually 1 choir rehearsal on a weekday evening) only. I know of a few lawyers who do this. This would also be quite suitable for the stay-home parent.

Perhaps this will get some of you interested.

I am teaching a graduate level course called Advanced Topics in Preventive Nutrition.  Although we don't eat TV, the topic of TV and a sedentary lifestyle does get discussed from time to time. In the course of the conversation, I told the students that I don't have a TV at home for 6 years now and they were quite curious how that happened.

When there was a TV in our house, we never had cable anyway. We got rid of the TV a few months after our first child was born, thinking that the problems of TV (e.g. too easy to just plop on the couch and click the remote rather than find something better to do) outweighs its benefit (educational shows).  My kids get to watch TV when they are at the grand parents' house.

I don't miss the TV. I am so busy that I really don't have the time to watch. When we want to watch a DVD, we watch it on the computer.

A student told the class that she used to baby sit for a family for a number of years. For a while, there was no TV in the house, then the parents bought a TV. And she was amazed by how quickly the kids got hooked by the TV. The kids did a lot of reading and other activities before the TV came along, but once there was a TV, they started spending a lot of time in front of it.

I am perfectly happy with a life without TV.

Well, Spring semester is over, but I am teaching the first session of summer school, and that means I get 2 weeks to frantically prepare.  As usual, I will be teaching Advanced Topics in Preventive Nutrition, a graduate level course.

Besides that, here is part of my academic-related to-do list for the summer:
- Write a grant to apply for money to run a one-year study to study the barriers of reducing salt intake for residents in a middle/low income neighborhood.
- Prepare two invited talks for conferences in Fall.
- Do some statistical analysis on diet and cancer risk (this is my main area of research)
- Write a review paper on Mediterranean diet and cardiovascular disease risk.
- Prepare for classes in Fall.

I can tell you right away that I won't be able to finish all of it, but such is the demands of my work.  I enjoy what I do, I just wish that I have 30 hours a day.

I am writing this from New Orleans as I am at a conference called Experimental Biology.  Years ago, this conference was called FASEB (which stands for Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology).  There are over 10,000 attendees this year from 6 professional organizations for research scientists in human biology.  The American Society of Nutrition is one of them and this morning I presented some research results at one of the sessions.

The most interesting thing actually happened after the presentation when people informally talk to each other.  It was a like a "authors, meet each other" event. People who read my papers came and tell me about it, and I saw all these people whom I have read their papers that I went to them to tell them. It was great to be able to put a face to the people whom I know their names and their work.

The only part of New Orleans I saw was the convention center, the French Quarter (where my hotel is), and the land between. What I saw looked normal from the last time I was here, which was about 10 months before Katrina. There were a fair number of tourists around. 

The week before Easter generally is very busy for the church organist, and at many places, more busy than even Christmas.

The past Tuesday, after my work at Simmons, I went to accompany choir rehearsal at a church -- the world's longest choir rehearsal. It was over 4 hours! First the children's choir rehearsed, then the adult choir, then the cantors (ie, song leaders) wanted to rehearsed.

On Thursday I played organ for a service in the evening, on Saturday, a 2.5 hour Mass (i.e. Easter Vigil) , and then on Easter Sunday services. Easter Vigil starts after sun down, and for this particular church, the service began at 8pm.  The first 1/3 of the service is done in candle light only. There was a light on the organ so that wasn't the problem. But a few years ago, it was a problem. I was playing the pieces on a piano with no lamp nearby. A choir member kindly shone her flashlight (the choir was reading the music with flashlight)  on the music for me (still too dim for easy reading). But the bigger problem was that the keyboard was still dark, so I could hardly see my fingers and the keys. What a disaster.

For Easter Sunday (today), there was a trumpet player who is a professor at the Berkeley College of Music. It is amazing how loud the trumpet is. With him playing next to me, I could barely hear the organ, and I pulled almost all the loud stops (i.e. set the organ at a loud volume).

Anyway, it was very busy and musically intense weekend, but it was wonderful. I enjoyed every bit of it. I had been practicing for this since Spring Break, and it is kind of sad that it is now all over. I can't say enough how I enjoy playing piano and organ. It allows me to take my mind off what I normally do and intensely focus on something else for awhile.

As each faculty has his/her own area of expertise, from time to time we are asked to give talks to groups outside Simmons. I love doing this kind of talks because it is a great way to promote Simmons. It is also a great opportunity to meet different people, and teach nutrition to non-students.

Recently, I gave 2 talks in the greater Boston area. The first one was in February for the northeast regional meeting of the American Culinary Federation.  This is the professional organization for chefs, and many of them are executives chefs in big restaurant chains or instructors at culinary schools. My presentation was about disease prevention through diet.

The second recent presentation was last week at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Dietetic Association.  This is the state affiliation of the American Dietetic Association, the professional organization for Registered Dietitian (which I am one).  My talk was on preventing cognitive decline in the elderly. I gave an overview on the scientific data in this topic. In particular, eating oily fish such as salmon may be linked to maintenance of cognitive function in the elderly.  Also, having normal blood glucose appears to be important as well. 

Now that my fellow bloggers Alisa and Professor White have blogged about books they read as a child, I felt that I should blog something about this as well.  Perhaps we bloggers can all write something on this topic!

I have always loved to read, and growing up in Hong Kong, I read a mix of English books and Chinese books from contemporary local authors.  Although I read quite a lot, I can't name any favorite titles I read during early teens. I did remember a book in Chinese by a woman who spent a few years in England as a student. The book was a series of short essays on her thoughts and experience. As I knew that I would have to go outside Hong Kong for college,  I was curious but also pensive about what my experience would be like.  A couple of years ago when I was looking at my old stuff in my parents' house (they have since moved to Canada), I re-read that book again. I also remember reading All Quiet on the Western Front right before Christmas one year -- not a good book to read for the season.

In college, having chosen science for my career, I made an effort to read well known English literature for I wouldn't be reading them for course work. I think the one that made the greatest impression was The Tale of Two Cities.  I found the ending rather chilling.

There are a lot of English literature that I didn't know about until the last 10 years or so. I didn't know about the Phantom Tollbooth until a few years ago. Although supposedly a children's book, the lesson is certainly suitable for any adults with a hectic life.

Nowadays, the books I read are mostly those useful for professional development. I have some Chinese martial arts novels that I bought a few years ago but I still haven't had a chance to read them.  After all those years in Hong Kong, I actually never read any martial arts novel (very popular at the time) though I did watch many TV and movies of that genre. My mom told me that martial arts novels are very addicting so I am still waiting for a time when I can afford the time if I can't put them down.

Spring break has just started, and as students excitedly go off to their various plans, what will I be doing?

It will be burners rotation time. In a previous entry, I mentioned that my life is like rotating burners. Now that classes are not in session, I put teaching on the back burner and put research on the front burner. I need to finish up a research paper, and run some statistical analysis to see if certain dietary patterns is related to heart disease in men. I need to crank out those analysis quick because the PI (Principal Investigator, ie the head huncho of a research project) needs those data quick.  So I'll be very busy this coming week.

While I am at it, let me briefly explain the hierarchy terminology in research.  The person on the top of the totem pole is the PI, followed by the Co-investigators (ie Co-I's, I am a Co-I in a couple of projects), followed by the post doctoral fellows (ie, post docs), followed by the grad students. The PI and the Co-I's write grants to get money for research, the post docs may take part in writing parts of the grant or they may also write their own grants.  The PIs and Co-I's are the people who get money to support salary of the post docs and stipends for the grad students.  The post docs and grad students in turn work on the research projects under the supervision of the PIs and Co-I's.  So that is the very rough and basic description on the operation of life science research.

Regarding chocolates being the food symbol of Valentine's Day, there are 2 things to muse about. First, it is how chocolates got involved with Valentine's Day -- which I actually have no clue but I am sure the information is available easily somewhere. The second being the nutritional features of chocolate.

Chocolate has 3 major ingredients: sugar, cocoa butter, and cocoa solid.  Milk chocolate has milk added to it, and dark chocolate comes in different percentages depending on the amount of cocoa liquor (the natural mixture of cocoa butter and solid in the cacao bean).  White chocolate does not have cocoa solid. Not all chocolate flavored foods contain real chocolate.  The chocolate flavor can be artificial.

Cocoa butter is an interesting fat. It is mainly a mixture of saturated fat and monounsaturated fat.  The monounsaturated (oleic acid, to be specific) is a healthy fat.  And although saturated fat generally is unhealthy, the story is actually more complicated.  A good amount of the saturated fat in chocolate is stearic acid, which has neutral effect on blood cholesterol level.

The darker the chocolate, the more antioxidant there is.  The antioxidant is in the cocoa solid.  Since antioxidant generally is a good thing for the body, is chocolate a healthy food then?  Well, it is a double-edged sword.  Although it contains antioxidant, it is unclear how much we need to eat everyday to accumulate a meaningful amount of benefit. Also, since chocolates contain sugar and fat (from the cocoa butter), it is not a low calorie food.   More over, chocolate (except white chocolate) contains  theobromine, which can increase heart rate and keep people awake just like caffeine, but the effect is much much weaker.

So what is a chocoholic to do? Being one myself, I follow 3 principles:
1. Eat real chocolate (and dark ones), not things with artificial chocolate flavor.
2. Eat a small amount.
3. Watch the whole diet, so that the sugar and fat from the chocolate does not add excess calories.

Happy Valentine's Day and enjoy the chocolate!

In one of my earlier entries, I said I would write about some funny stories from my Sunday altered ego.

With a large of population of people with Irish ancestry in Boston, often times there would be  bagpipers at funerals. I overheard this from a group of elderly men who were chatting after a regular Sunday church service. One of the men said, "I hate bagpipes. Please don't have bagpipes at my funeral. If there is, I am going to get up and leave."

Have you seen dogs at weddings? I have. Twice. And the dogs were part of the wedding party. They marched down the aisle along with the bridesmaids and groomsmen. Both times, the dogs were perfectly behaved -- the entire duration of the wedding. I was so amazed.

At a particular Christmas service, I was accompanying the cantor (ie, the song leader). I was playing out of a photocopy of some music, but I did not clip the paper securely on the music rack. The papers fell down, and I was frantically trying to keep the music going with one hand and savage the rest of the papers with another hand. This resulted in a few wrong notes. The cantor thought she skipped a verse, and said "ooops" loud enough for all to hear.

During the season of Advent, some churches have an "Advent wreath". It is a wreath made with green garlands, positioned horizontally, with 4 candles. Candles are lit according to the weeks in Advent. In churches that don't rotate which candle gets lit, candle no. 1 would then be lit for 4 weeks while candle no. 4 only lit for 1 week. At one particular church, moments before a service at the 4th week of Advent, candle no. 1 was burnt so low that the wreath caught on fire. While the congregation was stunned motionless, the custodian (a tall, large man) dashed down the center aisle with a fire extinguisher and doused the fire out.

I actually did not witness the event. I arrived at the church right after the service to practice, and found many members of the congregation were helping to clean the powder from the fire extinguisher off the pews.

In the spirit of being green, Simmons has switched to using more biodegradable disposable food containers.  These corn-based products also include eating utensils. But how about a step forward -- edible food containers and eating utensils? Imagine after enjoying your cup of coffee, you can proceed to eat the cup! Or how about eating that plate after you finished your lunch? Well there are bread bowls out there for soups that were popular for a while some time ago, and while there are people experimenting out there, I am not aware of anything that is commercially available.

I did a quick Google search on "edible utensils" and found a few links on edible spoons and cups that are flour-based. I hope some food scientist would give this idea some serious thought. Now it might not be so polite to eat that crunchy cup at a board meeting, but there must be occasions that people won't mind others biting into their fork.

If you are looking for some humorous science to read, check out the Chirstmas issue of the British Journal of Medicine. Normally the BMJ is a very difficult journal to publish in. Only the top papers get published there. But every year, the issue published closest to Christmas is filled with fun and humorous articles and research reports. The methodology of the research is still very good so science is not compromised, but the way the studies were conducted, or the topic itself, is often very funny.

For this year's issue, please go to:
http://www.bmj.com/content/vol337/issue7684/

Access is free. Enjoy! And do remember to breathe even when you are laughing.

The title pretty much sums up my life through the calendar or academic year.  I suspect some other professors may have similar "yearly rhythm".

When classes are in session, there is very little time to do research. So once classes is over, like winter break and summer, that is my prime research time. So for the next month or so, research is moved to the front burner and teaching to the back burner.

So what am I doing over winter break? Besides trying to crunch out some research work, I need to prepare for next semester's classes. I will be teaching Medical Nutrition Therapy, and since clinical practice changes, I have to update my teaching materials. I am also preparing 2 talks, one for the regional meeting of the American Culinary Federation (the professional organization for chefs) and the other for the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Dietetic Association (the Massachusetts chapter of the professional organization for Registered Dietitians). There is also work for the committees that I serve at Simmons.

On top of that, I'll accompany (on the piano) a short children's concert, then play organ for 3 services straight on Christmas Eve.  It'll be exciting, but I need to schedule in some practice time. When I was a kid, I didn't like to practice. My parents had to sit next to the piano to make sure I practiced.  But now as an adult, I actually enjoy it.

In short, I'll be really busy, but it will be rewarding. I am looking forward to the work. Hope you will have a good holiday season!

I have mentioned in a previous post that I am a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Nutrition. To explain that further, let me describe what researchers in life sciences do after they emerge from their labs, the field, or other research venues armed with data.

There's basically two things people do with their research results. Very often they do both of them, but one of them is more important than the other. OK, enough suspense, so what are these things? One of them is to submit their research results to a scientific meeting.  If the organizers deemed it worth presenting, the results is presented either in a 10 to 15 minute talk, or in a form of a "poster".  The poster is usually 4 feet tall and 8 feet across where people lay out their research.

The other, and the more important thing, is to publish the research results in a "peer-reviewed journal".  So the researchers write up the research in a specified format, send the "manuscript" to a journal.  The editor will then send it to 2-3 "reviewers" who will critique the manuscript.  Reviewers are experts in the particular topic. The editor gets comments back from the reviewers, and decide whether to reject the paper, or ask for revisions and then re-consider accepting the paper.

Scientific journals usually have an Editorial Board, which is a group of experienced reviewers who will review many manuscripts each year. There are also ad hoc reviewers, whom the editor invites to review a manuscript here and there once a while.

In high quality journals, the vast majority of manuscripts do not get accepted the first time. If the author gets a notice to revise the manuscript and re-submit again, it is considered good news. I actually got a "congratulations" from one of my professors when I submitted my very first manuscript to a journal and received a "revise and resubmit" letter.  The whole review and revise process easily takes 5-6 months.  Then it is a few more months before the manuscript is published -- by then it is called a "paper".

Once it is published, the mass media may pick it up and run news reports and articles, and interview the lead author on it.

When I was in graduate school at the Harvard School of Public Health, my physiology professor Dr. Bob Banzett used a donut to describe the human body. That the donut is the body and the donut hole is the digestive track (the top opening is the mouth and the bottom opening is the other end). And he would ask, "If things are in the donut hole, is it in the donut or outside the donut?".  And it would dawn to the students that unless things are absorbed, having it in the digestive track does not equal being inside the body.  I now use this analogy with my students. Not only because it is useful for teaching, but any food-related usually gets nutrition students excited as well. 

I have mentioned in my bio that I play organ for churches on Sundays.  I am not the "resident organist" at any particular church, rather, I am a "sub" (the industry lingo for substitute) or freelance organist. It is great to be a sub, I get to call which Sunday I want a gig (which I'd prefer to call it an "assignment"). And unlike resident organists, I don't have to worry about finding a sub if I need to be away.  I was a resident organist for many years before my kids were born, and what a pain it was to try to find subs that you can trust.  There are a lot of good organists around, but it is always a bit nerve-wrecking when you call someone you don't know.

Well, how do churches locate subs when they need them? Besides the usual "word of mouth", the greater Boston area also has a "sub list".  Let me back track and give you some back ground information.  There is a professional organization for organists The American Guild of Organists.  The Boston chapter (supposedly the largest chapter in the country) maintains a "sub list".  You have to a member in order to get on the list.  So half of the time, I get calls from people I don't know but got my name from that list, and half of the time it is "word of mouth".

From my experience, it seems that the demand for subs is not small, even outside summer.  I have come across situations for short term medical leave coverage, or interim of a few months when a church is in the process of hiring a new organist. And of course, there is the usual vacation coverage that is only 1 or 2 weeks long. The vacation coverage is not that common outside the summer months.  So summer is the predictably busy months for subs, but the weekend after Christmas is too. As organists are stuck at their jobs at Christmas, they visit families usually the weekend after.

I promise I'll tell some funny situations that I encounter as an organist.

FNCE, which stands for Food and Nutrition Conference and Exposition, is the annal meeting of the American Dietetic Association.  This is the professional organization for Registered Dietitian (I am an RD).  I am writing this at FNCE, which this year is in Chicago.

O'Hare airport is amazing, I can't believe that at 11:30 pm on a Sunday, it was very busy. There was probably about 100 people waiting for taxi (I didn't count carefully).  I won't have time to do any site-seeing, which is usually the case with conferences. I attended several talks today that provided me with new materials for my teaching, and I checked out many new food products at the Exposition. And now here I am, at 9:46pm Eastern Time, I have just finished reviewing a scientific report submitted to a journal (maybe I'll talk about this in another entry). But I want to jot a few lines on this blog about my trip. 

I called my kids earlier, and everything seems to be under control. But I won't be back home until late Tuesday night. Let's hope that my husband can hold down the fort for another day.

Hello Everyone,

This is my first time blogging.  I have agreed to blog because it is an interesting experience. But I hope this is not going to be a one-way thing -- with me talking all the time. I would love to hear your thoughts.  So please feel free to write back, as well as tell me what you would like me to blog about.

A day in the life of professors? Well, there is no standard. There are 3 generally areas: teaching, research, and "service".  Teaching is self explanatory (it includes student advising), research is also reasonably self explanatory. "Service" is not so self-explanatory so let me explain.  I am in several committees within the College and I chair one of those committees, that's part of "service". The service can also include activities in professional organizations. For example, I am a member of the Nominating Committee of the Research Dietetics Practice Group, which is a sub-group within the American Dietetic Association. I am also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Nutrition.

So needless to say, I am quite busy. A good part of my work can be done outside the office, so which means I end up working at all hours of the day, and all days of the week. As a matter of fact, after my kids go to bed (ie, around 8pm), I turn on my computer and run statistical analysis for my research. That is generally how I spend my evenings.

Oh well, that gives you a glimpse of what my professional life is like. I'll talk about something else next time.