Framingham Heart Study

On Monday, our group took a 30-min. charter bus ride to visit the site of the monumental Framingham Heart Study. This is a big deal to a a public health person such as myself; the FHS comes up in any given public health class as the premier longitudinal cohort study from which a huge amount of data has produced new national recommendations about cardiovascular health and aging well. I could go on, but I know it's not exactly tantalizing blog material for everyone. In short, the opportunity to personally tour the building in which this groundbreaking research continues to go on, as well as speak to lead investigators, nurses, and data analysts, is once in a lifetime. 

But I'll start at the beginning of the day: Someone in the dining hall was totally monopolizing the waffle maker, which I have grown to love since arriving here. (Best breakfast: waffle with peanut butter, honey, and bananas on top. Substituting waffles with pancakes also works.) So I only had a banana and a bowl of rice chex, which is a rather airy cereal and not that filling. Sure enough, about an hour later in class, I broke out my emergency bar from my backpack (which meant I could not take a photo--sorry, I truly plan on being better about documenting my meals.) I had a Luna: Lemon Bliss bar. This bar smells more lemony than it tastes. There are odd globs of lemon fruit preserves among the rice crisps that compose normal Luna bars, as well as lemon icing on the bottom. I feel like it is overwhelmingly lemon-flavored, and I could simply buy lemon gummies or the like to get the same effect, at least taste-wise. But it helped carry me over to lunch time. 

My rating: 3/5. 

After a lunch, which for me was a hummus wrap with lots of raw veggies, an apple, and two cookies, we started the FHS tour.
  

Ahh! Public health nerd freakout! The FHS staff are very careful about calling the individuals they monitor "participants" rather than "patients" because they are partaking in a research study. The clinicians do not diagnose illness--anything alarming gets messaged to the individuals primary physicians.

A nondescript building, with amazing minds inside.

So far, my summer program has only fueled my desire to pursue a career in biostatistics. 

Pancakes or waffles? 

Should I invest in a waffle maker? It's one of those mono-functional kitchen tools of which Alton Brown would disapprove.