We are off to Las Vegas for the week, so, unless the house sitter fires up one of the laptop computers that we left behind, don’t look for much of anything new to appear here in the days ahead. A series of Las Vegas-themed posts are being culled from the archives and will be hoisted up at the new financial blog/investment website – IaconoResearch.com – in what should be a fun exercise in looking back at Sin City during happier times.

On the news the other day, they were talking about how Nevada keeps doing a hat-trick month after month – the nation’s highest unemployment, highest foreclosure rate, and most underwater homeowners. My guess is that it won’t look much different to us than it did four years ago when we were last there.

So, I went in for my annual physical today after being told last year to “just keep doing what I was doing” since everything was in reasonably good shape, all the vital statistics within normal ranges without the aid of any sort of medication to keep them that way.

As it happened, about a month after last April’s visit I decided to not take the doctor’s advice by radically change the way I ate and, since I have data from last year’s exam and today’s, comparing the two side-by-side makes for an interesting exercise.

I thought I was in decent shape a year ago, but little did I realize how big an impact a zero sugar, zero processed food, reduced carbohydrate diet would have, one that also includes plenty of fat and protein (via meat, fish, foul, eggs, butter, cheese, etc.) along with large portions of green leafy vegetables.

I’m no expert on the subject (though I do know a lot more than a year ago), but I was expecting the cholesterol numbers to go higher (but stay within an acceptable range) and that the triglycerides would come down substantially, as they did.

I can’t say enough about the benefits of dramatically changing your diet by, basically, replacing most of the carbohydrates you eat with meat and green vegetables and now there are some pretty interesting numbers to back that up.

From this Wall Street Journal story the other day about presidential politics comes the graphic below on the subject of health care coverage in the U.S. (I didn’t quite see the connection between the two, but that doesn’t make the data any less interesting) and it is clear to see how uneven health insurance is – both across the nation and across states.

They classify communities as “Immigration Nation” all the way to “Campus and Careers” where the former are least insured and the latter most insured. Not surprisingly, the counties where state governments are located have some of the highest levels of health care coverage and, interestingly, “Evangelical Epicenters” have some of the lowest coverage whereas, Mormon Outposts have some of the highest.