Posts Tagged ‘health’
want to live to 100?
… It may destroy diseases of the imagination, owing to too deep a sensibility, and it may attach the affections to objects, permanent, important, and intimately related to the interests of the human species.
Humphry Davy, on the value of science, in ‘Discourse introductory to a course of lectures on chemistry’, 1802
A great many of us would like to live a long and healthy life, with a greater emphasis on health than length. But both please, if possible, thanks.
I’ve been reading the issues of New Scientist: the collection as they come out. The first issue dealt with the Big Questions, namely Reality, Existence, God, Consciousness, Life, Time, Self, Sleep and Death. Bit of a roller coaster ride, leaving me dizzy, confused, but often enlightened, and sometimes even exhilarated. So, better than a roller coaster. The second issue, entitled The Unknown Universe, took me far out beyond multiverses, quantum loops, energetic dark matter and the eventful horizons of black holes, and essentially taught me that modern cosmology is a mess of competing theories, often competing, it seemed, to be the most egregious ideas that are compatible with mathematical possibility. However, it may be that the studious avoidance of scary maths in these essays/summaries may have made them seem more loopy (or strangulatingly stringy) than they are.
The third issue was more down to earth, and not only earth but me, and you, dear reader. It’s entitled The scientific guide to a better you, and it’s all about longevity, health and success.
So what’s the secret, at least for the first two? Basically, eat healthily, with not too much meat, make sure you have good genes, don’t be too much of a loner (too late for me, I’ve been a loner for 40 years, and that’s unlikely to change, but I’l try, as I always say), be intelligent, active and exploratory. That’s the message of the first half of this issue anyway.
What interested me, though, was the detail. Measurements. Blood sugar, cholesterol, heart rate and many other factors and parameters, most of which I didn’t know I had to be concerned about. The various essays are peppered with these measures of health or lack thereof, but how does your average Jo like me get a measure of these things without pestering doctors on a weekly basis about wellness instead of sickness?
So, for fun, I thought I’d look into these ways of measuring ourselves and see if we can manage them from home. A sort of practical guide to centenarianism and beyond.
1. Body mass index (BMI)
Your BMI is a very rough-and-ready guide to whether or not you’re a healthy weight for your height. Various websites can calculate this for you instantly if you know your height and weight. My current BMI is 26, according to the Heart Foundation, which it regards as ‘overweight’, though very close to the borderline between ‘overweight’ and ‘healthy’. About three years ago my BMI was 29, well into the overweight category, in fact getting close to obese. I decided to eat less, without fasting or ‘going on a diet’, and to try to up my exercise, and over a 2-year period I brought my BMI down from 29 to 23, well into the healthy range. Since then it has crept back up to 26, and I’m struggling to get it back down again. I just need to lose a couple of kilos, and keep them off. The myriad other ways of measuring your health these days might make the old BMI seem outmoded – it doesn’t measure your fat to muscle ratio, for example, or the amount of fat around your heart and other organs – but I find it a useful guide for me, and the cheapest available.
2. Heart rate/blood pressure
Measured in beats per minute, your heart rate naturally varies with exertion, and also with anxiety, stress, illness, drug use and so on. The normal resting heart rate for an adult human ranges from 60 to 100 bpm. You can measure your own heart rate (your pulse) at any time by finding an artery close to the surface. The radial artery on the wrist, the one you see heading in the direction of the thumb, is commonly used due to ease of location, but don’t try it with your thumb which has its own strong pulse. I’ve just located my own wrist pulse and measured it as 62bpm. That’s the first time I’ve ever done it. However, I imagine it would be harder to measure after a bout of HIIT (high intensity interval training), which I sometimes indulge in, or after a moderately strenuous bike-ride. It would be even harder while you’re in the middle of exercise, so that’s where heart rate monitors, including those that can be worn on the wrist, come in handy. A quick google-glance tells me that such wrist devices are selling at $100 to $150. However, caveat emptor, as doubt is being cast on their accuracy. Electrocardiographs (ECGs, or EKGs), which measure the electrical activity of your heart, provide a much more accurate record than heart rate monitors, which are apparently only really effective when you’re at rest. One of the problems is that these optical monitors use light to track your blood, and to get an ‘accurate’ reading, you need to be very still, which sort of defeats the purpose. Reporter Sharon Profis, with the help of cardiologist Jon Saroff of Kaiser Permanente medical center in San Francisco compared various wrist monitor brands with the gold standard EKG measurements, and found them well off-beam especially at over 100 bpm. However, the Garmin Vivofit chest strap monitor, which measures electrical activity, was very accurate. This device can be bought for around $150 in Australia.
3. Cholesterol
Cholesterol’s an essential organic molecule, a sterol, a structural component of our cell membranes. It’s biosynthesised, mainly by our liver cell, often as a precursor to such vital entities as steroid hormones and vitamin D, and researchers have tracked the 37-step process of its synthesis. Cholesterol is transported through the blood within lipoproteins, and that’s where you get HDL (high-density lipoprotein) and LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, of which the former is the one that causes problems. Some 32% of Australian adults have high blood cholesterol, the primary cause of atherosclerosis, leading to clogging of major blood vessels. Ways of lowering your LDL levels include not smoking, avoiding transfats, regular moderate exercise, and healthy eating including fruit, veg, grains and pulses and sterol-enriched foods. But of course you know all that. The big question is, can you measure your cholesterol from home? The current answer appears to be no, according to the Harvard Medical School (though I note that their article is 11 years old). The problem is that home testing kits can’t separate the ‘good’ HDL cholesterol from the ‘bad” (LDL). Measuring your overall cholesterol levels might be useful, but the real issue is the proportion that is LDL, not to mention that cholesterol can also be carried by other molecules such as triglycerides.
4. Blood sugar/glucose
Glucose is a vital source of energy for the body’s cells, and its levels are associated with the hormone insulin, produced by the pancreas. Blood glucose levels naturally vary throughout the day, and having a level regularly above normal is termed hyperglycemia. Hypoglycemia is the term for low levels. Diabetes (technically Diabetes mellitus) is the disease most commonly associated with high blood sugar. General symptoms are frequent urination, hunger pangs and increased thirst. The mean normal blood sugar level is around 5.5 mM (millimolars). That’s the international standard measure – the Americans measure it differently, which causes the usual confusion. Not surprisingly, considering the global rise in diabetes, blood glucose meters for use at home are readily available, but they’re mostly specially devised for use by diabetics, supervised by healthcare professionals. You can of course buy one and DIY but you must learn to be inured to pricks, and unless you’re at risk, which I’m not, as I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, don’t have particularly high cholesterol, and have never evinced any diabetic symptoms, it’s probably not worth the investment. The essential test associated with ‘pre-diabetes’ or hypoglycaemia is a glucose-tolerance test (GTT).
5. Sequence your genome
According to the Australian government’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC):
Rapid advances in DNA sequencing technologies now allow an individual’s whole genome to be sequenced. Although this is still relatively expensive, it is likely that in the near future it will become affordable and readily available.
Ah, that other country, the near future. But it is a fact that the price is coming down, from $10 million in 2005 to a mere $1 million in 2007 when James Watson’s genome was sequenced. The going rate in 2012 was under $10,000, and this year (2014) the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney became one of only three institutes in the world to deliver whole sequenced genomes at under $1000. However, there’s a problem. Your genome will mean nothing to you without expert analysis and interpretation, at a hefty price tag. So what would be the purpose, from a health perspective, of ‘doing your genome’? If you’re already quite healthy, do you want to spend up to $1000 only to find out that you carry a gene which may pre-dispose you to a disease that’s currently non-preventable? Our genome is very complex, so much so that current thinking on the subject, and especially on the introns, the sections that don’t code for proteins, has become more cloudy than ever. We know, or think we know, that the number of introns an organism has is positively correlated with that organism’s complexity, but that’s about all we know for sure, and considering the enormous complexity of the interaction between genetics and environment, together with our lack of knowledge of the role of so much of our genome (over 98% of which is non-coding DNA), the question of whether it’s worth sequencing at this time is a live one. Of course if the price comes down to $100, or the price of a latte (which will soon be up around that figure) then it’d be well worth it; you would have it there awaiting scientific breakthroughs on all that non-coding stuff.
6. microbiome
If you’ve been paying attention to the world of human health, you’ll know that the microbiome is all the rage at the moment. the term was coined by Joshua Lederburg, who defined it thus, according to Wikipedia:
A microbiome is “the ecological community of commensal, symbiotic, and pathogenic microorganisms that literally share our body space.”
You may well have heard the impressive statistic that you have ten times more bacterial cells (and, most interestingly, archaean cells) growing on or in you than bodily (eukaryotic) cells, though this might become less impressive when you learn that the combined weight of those cells amounts to only a few hundred grams. Still, recent research on the microbiota has turned up some interesting results, especially for health. One finding, which may make it difficult to assess your own microbiome, is that different sets of microbes appear to perform the same function for different people. So you won’t just need to know the genetic content of your microbiome, but its function. Still, we can learn a lot already from our microbiome, according to Catalyst, the ABC science program. For example, we inherit a lot of bacteria from our mothers, via her breast milk, not only directly but because the sugars in breast milk encourage the growth of particular types of bacteria. Most of this gut bacteria does its work in the large intestine or bowel region. They’re anaerobic beasties, so they die when exposed to air. However, recent technological developments (and how often can that story be told) have allowed us to learn far more about them, by sequencing their genes inside the gut. From this we’ve learned that our gut bacteria are vital components of our immune system. And since these bacteria rely on our own diets for their nourishment, the kind of microbiome we have is profoundly related to what we eat. A diverse microbiome results, apparently, from eating a high-fibre diet, and low-fibre processed food, and the ingesting of antibiotics, is reducing that diversity, and contributing to multiple health problems. It appears that a less diverse microbiome finds itself under stress, leading to inflammation, an immune response that can damage our own tissue. As a sufferer from bronchiectasis, a chronic (and incurable) inflammation of the airways due probably to early childhood damage, I’m particularly concerned to limit the extent of inflammation through diet and exercise, so this is probably the aspect of my health I’m most concerned to monitor. And there’s also the relationship between gut bacteria and obesity. Some 62% of Australians are overweight or obese, and I’m one of that majority, and trying not to be.
It has been shown clearly, in mice at least, that a high-fibre diet reduces bronco-constriction, improving resistance to asthma and other airways conditions such as COPD. This is mainly due to the production of short-chain fatty acids by particular bacteria. The short-chain fatty acids are produced though the digestion of dietary fibre. Interestingly, acetate, found in vinegar, is a short-chain fatty acid, and a natural anti-inflammatory, so that’s something I should include regularly in my diet.
Finding out what your particular microbiome is, and how it might align with your health, is a simple if rather unpalatable and ‘intimate’ process. You can apply for a kit from the American Gut Project, an organisation dedicated to researching microbiota. The kit is for obtaining a sample of your ‘biomass’ as they call it, which you then send back to the AGP for analysis. All of this was spelt out in the above-linked Catalyst program, but since that program was aired two months ago, the AGP has been inundated with more biomass than it can deal with, so there’s been a backlog of logs, as it were. I plan to send for a kit anyway. The AGP sends back the results, apparently, with hopefully an analysis of the microbiome easy enough for a layperson to understand.
So there’s six areas to look at, either independently or with the help of your GP or other professionals, in terms of measuring how you’re going in terms of overall health, and there are many more aspects of your bodily chemistry and physiology to check up on – hormones, neurotransmitters, bone density, sight, hearing, lung capacity and so forth. Or you can follow the standard advice on diet and exercise, try to avoid stress and hope for the best. And above all don’t stop laughing and dancing, otherwise life would hardly be worth living.
how much damage is synthetic fertiliser doing to soil?
“A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
In a recent conversation, in which I was accused of being too black-and-white about the positives of conventional agriculture and GMOs, the damaging effects of synthetic fertiliser were mentioned as a negative, as it ‘kills the soil’s organisms, including earthworms’.
So now I’m going to focus on that issue specifically, and follow the evidence where it leads me. There’s no doubt that intensive agriculture and mono-cropping are having a negative impact on soil quality, just as there’s no doubt that intensive agriculture is currently required to feed the world’s human population. So what’s to be done? First, we could reduce or stabilise the world’s population, which we’re trying to do. Second, we can try to find biotech solutions, developing a type of intensive agriculture that’s less damaging to the soil and the environment – and organic approaches might help us in this. GMOs also offer promise, developing crops which require less in the way of fertilisers and pesticides, and deliver higher yields.
There are other ways of looking at this and so many other problems, as I’ve recently become aware of complexity theory, which I’ll write about soon, but for now I’ll look at the claims being made and the solutions being offered.
So what exactly is synthetic or chemical fertiliser doing to our soil? Needless to say, in order to obtain accurate data in answer to this question we have to negotiate our way through sources dedicated to maximising, or minimising, the harm being done. So I’ll start with a definition. Here’s one from a website called Diffen, dedicated apparently to making unbiased comparisons between rival goods and services, in this case chemical v organic fertilisers.
A chemical fertiliser is defined as any inorganic material of wholly or partially synthetic origin that is added to the soil to sustain plant growth. Chemical fertilisers are produced synthetically from inorganic materials. Since they are prepared from inorganic materials artificially, they may have some harmful acids, which stunt the growth of microorganisms found in the soil helpful for plant growth naturally. They’re rich in the three essential nutrients needed for plant growth. Some examples of chemical fertilisers are ammonium sulphate, ammonium phosphate, ammonium nitrate, urea, ammonium chloride and the like.
Diffen goes on to describe the pros and cons, but there isn’t much detail beyond high acidity and ‘changes to soil fertility’. A 2009 article in Scientific American goes further, describing these mostly petroleum-based fertilisers as having these dire effects:
wholesale pollution of most of our streams, rivers, ponds, lakes and even coastal areas, as these synthetic chemicals run-off into the nearby waterways.
What this article doesn’t mention is that human waste (i.e feces), grey water etc is also getting into our waterways and causing damage, and it’s hard to separate out these many forms of pollution. In any case, I’m confining this piece to direct damage to the soil rather than to waterways, important though that obviously is.
One of the principal causes of soil degradation is leaching, the loss of water-soluble plant nutrients through rains and storms, and irrigation. Fertiliser can contribute to this problem. When nitrate (NO3) is added to the soil to boost plant growth, excess NO3 ions aren’t able to be absorbed by the soil and are eventually leached out into groundwater and waterways. The degree of leaching depends on soil type, the nitrate content of the soil, and the degree of absorption of the nitrates by the plants or crops on that soil. Again, though, the leaching is caused by water, and the soil degradation is largely a natural process, though over-irrigation can contribute. This is why the older soils, such as those in Australia, are the most lacking in nutrients. They’ve been subjected to eons of wind and water weathering. The richest areas have been renewed by volcanic activity.
Not all chemical fertiliser is the same, or of the same quality. Phosphate fertilisers commonly contain impurities such as fluorides and the heavy metals cadmium and uranium. Removing these completely is costly, so fertiliser can come in grades of purity (most backyard-gardener fertiliser, the stuff that comes in little pellets, is very pure). Many widely used phosphate fertilisers contain fluoride, and this has prompted research into the effects of a higher concentration of fluoride in soil. The effect on plants has been found to be minimal, as plants take up very little fluoride. Livestock ingesting contaminated soils as they munch on plants could be a bigger problem, as could be fluoride’s effect on soil microorganisms. Fluoride is very immobile in soil, so groundwater is unlikely to be contaminated.
Acidification from the regular use and over-use of acidulated phosphate fertilisers has been a problem in some areas, particularly in Malaysia and Indonesia, where aluminium toxicity has caused severe soil degradation. Acidity of soils is a serious problem in Australia, where in NSW more than half the agricultural land is affected. Most agricultural plants require a pH of 5.5 to 8.0 to grow best, though some plants are much more tolerant than others of lower pH levels. Surface acidity can be corrected with the application of ground limestone, but subsurface acidity is a growing problem and much more difficult to correct. Acidification is generally a slow natural process caused by wind and water weathering, but it can be greatly accelerated by the use of fertilisers containing ammonium or urea. It can also be caused by a build-up of organic matter. As an example of the complexity of all this, superphosphate doesn’t directly affect soil acidity but it promotes the growth of clover and other legumes, a build-up of organic matter which increases soil acidity.
A comment on fertiliser and worms. No, they don’t kill worms, and because they stimulate plant growth they’re likely to increase the population of worms – but there are worms and worms. Some are highly invasive and have been transported from elsewhere. Some can be damaging to plants. At the same time new plants, and new worms, tend to adapt to each other over time. Again, complexity cannot be underestimated.
Another concern about chemical fertiliser, again not connected to soil quality as such, is nitrous oxide emissions. About 75% of nitrous oxide emissions from human activity in the USA came from chemical fertiliser use in agriculture in 2012, and we are steadily adding to the nitrous oxide levels in the atmosphere. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas which, on a unit comparison, is 300 times more damaging than carbon dioxide.
In conclusion, it’s likely that everything you do in agriculture has a downside. There are no free lunches. The key is to obtain as much knowledge as possible, not only about your patch, but about nutrient and resource cycles generally. It’s all connected.
Oh and above all be sceptical of some of the ridiculous claims, and the ridiculous propaganda, out there. Check them out on a reputable, evidence-based site.
more on organic food
Since my post of almost a year ago, on the marketing scam that is ‘organic’ food, I’ve noted that this niche market continues to be less niche and more mainstream, so that I no longer make an effort to avoid it. As long as the food’s fresh, tasty and nutritious, I’m happy.
And yet… I think part of my irritation is that I hate fashion. I mean, why the fuck do all these drongos go around wearing Hurley tank-tops and t-shirts? It’s not as if they’re even remotely interesting or imaginative or anything.
However, I must admit the fashion for ‘organics’ is more comprehensible to me than the fashion for Hurley or Nike, labels for goods that are clearly no better than those of their rivals. It seems that organic food has captured the imagination largely because it sounds environmentally positive for those who want to do the right thing without thinking about it too much. Okay it’s a bit more expensive, but there has to be a price for being on the side of the angels, and it’s nice to be trendy and holier-than-thou at the same time.
Then there are the hardened ideologues who take to ‘organics’ as to a religion, actively seeking converts and feeling smugly superior to those who haven’t yet been ‘saved’. Among those are the real fanatics who warn that conventional food is killing us, that GM ‘horror’ foods and the agribusinesses pedalling them will take over the world and make zombies of us all, and/or that there’s a conspiracy to hide from us the damage that chemically-infested conventional food is doing world-wide.
Of course some will describe me as an ideologue through-and-through, or at least as a hopelessly biased person making fatuous claims to objectivity – a description I’m quite accustomed to hearing – but I can only do my best to be open-minded and undermining of my own prejudices. And if that doesn’t convince anyone I’ll soldier on anyway.
One excuse for returning to the subject is a blog/website called Academics Review, subtitled ‘testing popular claims against peer-reviewed science’, which has posted a piece called ‘Organic Marketing Report‘. Dr Stephen Novella has spoken about the piece on the SGU podcast and on Neurologica blog, but I want to take the opportunity to revisit the issue, as I’ve done so many times in my mind.
For me, three popular claims are made about ‘organic’ food, a kind of ‘nest of claims’ of increasing grandeur and complexity. The most basic claim is that it tastes better, the middle claim is that it’s more nutritious, and the grandest claim is that it’s better for the environment. So let’s look at these claims one at a time, with particular reference to the Academics Review post, where it can help us.
taste
The perception of taste is one of the most subjective and easily manipulable of all our perceptions. Researchers have had a field day with this. You may have heard of the experiments done with white wine dyed with food colouring to look like red, and how this fooled all the wine experts. Numerous other experiments have been done to show that our taste perception can be influenced by mood, by colour, by setting and by the way the food is talked up or talked down before tasting. Then there’s the question of differences between people’s taste buds. What are taste buds? These are the areas on the surface of the tongue, the soft palate and the upper oesophagus that contain taste receptors. Taste buds are constantly being replenished, each one lasting on average 5 days, and it’s estimated that we’ve permanently lost half of our taste receptors by the age of 20. Separate receptors for the basic tastes of bitter, sweet and umami have been found, and the hunt is on for sour. It’s likely that the number of receptors and differences in action of those receptors varies slightly in individuals, so it’s pretty well impossible to get anything substantive out of individual claims that x tastes better than y. However, if in a blind tasting, with a good sample size, we get 80%, or a substantial majority, saying that x tastes better than y, that would be significant.
Of course, it’s difficult to control for all the variables and just to test for ‘organic’ versus conventional. The age of the food, freshness, soil quality, method of growing and various other factors not directly related to organics would have to be neutralised. So we have to take a skeptical approach to all findings.
One blind tasting, reported on here, compared tomatoes, broccoli and potatoes. 194 ‘expert food analysts’ tasted the food and found, according to the report, that the conventional tomatoes tasted sweeter, juicier and more flavoursome than ‘organic’ ones. No significant differences were noted with the broccoli and potatoes. The report doesn’t give the percentage of experts who preferred the conventional tomatoes, and there were some vital differences in the way the produce was grown. In all, not a very convincing study either way.
A series of informal taste tests, conducted in 2007 by Stephanie Zonis, an organic food advocate, comparing eggs, yoghurt, cheese, raspberries and peanut butter among other foodstuffs, found mixed results, mostly a tie in each case, though it seems not to have been a blind tasting and was entirely subjective. She showed commendable honesty, ending with the remark that she didn’t buy organic for the taste.
This cute little video has 3 different products – eggs, carrots and goat’s cheese – and three different subjects tasting them, all of them food experts. Results again are mixed, but the subsequent discussions show that it isn’t the organic v conventional distinction that matters so much. With the cheese it’s the cultures used to produce them, with the carrots it’s the soils and climate, with the eggs it’s whether they’re free range or battery animals, how long the eggs having been hanging around in the supermarket, etc. There are just too many variable to make these kinds of tests particularly useful.
The taste issue regarding organics, I contend, will never be resolved. The trouble is, organic food is constantly touted by advocates (though, to be fair, not all of them) as having superior taste.
Guys, stop doing that.
nutritional content and health
Organics are often recommended as the healthier option, and there are, it seems to me, two aspects to this claim. First, that they contain more and/or better nutrients, and second that they’re healthier because they contain less ‘toxic chemicals’ in the form of pesticides and/or fertilisers. Naturally most consumers of organic foods conflate these two separate issues.
So let’s look briefly at the nutrient issue first.
The Mayo Clinic, the Harvard Medical School and various other reputable sites that I’ve checked out have all said much the same, that there is no statistically significant evidence that organic food is more nutritious. Of course you will be able to find studies, amongst the very many that have been carried out, that do provide such evidence, but that’s to be expected. Overall the jury’s still out. I don’t think it’ll ever be in. Personally, though, I think we can bypass the findings of endless studies by asking the question “How can nutrients be added to food by organic practices?” I can’t quite see how the practices of organic farming – no synthetic fertilisers or pesticides, no food irradiation, no GMOs – can by themselves add to the nutrients of food grown conventionally. If anyone can explain to me how they can, I’d be prepared to take the studies more seriously.
A more complex issue is that of organics and food safety and public health.
This issue is largely a negative one – that organic foods are healthier because of what they don’t have. Unfortunately, this often involves playing up, as much as possible, the risks and dangers of conventional food. The Organic Marketing Report makes some disturbing points here, quoting one organics promoter, Kay Hamilton, speaking at a conference in 1999: If the threats posed by cheaper, conventionally produced products are removed, then the potential to develop organic foods will be limited. In other words, it’s in the interests of organic food marketers to stress the dangers of conventional foods at every opportunity, and this is being done all over the internet, in case you haven’t noticed.
Some 15 years ago, when the organic marketing push really started to get under way in the USA, conventional food producers expressed concern to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) that the organic movement was seeking to increase market share by promoting bogus claims about its own products and misinformation about conventional practices. In response, the USDA, with support from the organic food industry, sought to clarify the then recently developed formulation of the organic marketing label. The Secretary of Agriculture had this to say in 2000:
Let me be clear about one thing. The organic label is a marketing tool. It is not a statement about food safety. Nor is ‘organic’ a value judgment about nutrition or quality.
Not surprisingly, though, these remarks have fallen on deaf years, and consumer surveys regularly show that organic food is perceived as healthier, safer and more nutritious, both in the US and elsewhere. Also, a study by the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service showed that people bought organic on the basis of the organic label or seal, rather than their understanding of the organic definition. Some 79% of those familiar with the seal could not identify the production standards behind the seal. As many independent observers have noted, the aggressive marketing of organic produce, with little concern for accuracy, has been the main driver of sales. US observers have also noted that the responsible regulators in terms of consumer protection and truth in advertising, namely the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have been ineffective due to lack of resources and a lack of will to investigate vague and nebulous claims.
The organic food industry constantly plays on public fears in its marketing strategies, without necessarily telling outright lies. For example, a campaign by the USA’s Organic Trade Association, using the slogan ‘Organic, it’s worth it’ trumpeted the fact that “All products bearing the organic label must comply with federal, state, FDA, and international food safety requirements”, as if this wasn’t the case with conventional food. Similarly, Stonyfield Organic, a major US producer of organic foods, made a decision in August 2013 to add to the organic seal on their products the term ‘no toxic pesticides used here’, as if this marked them out from other food producers.
If we look beyond the aggressive marketing, which appears to be a mixture of deliberate misinformation and wishful thinking – a sort of naturalistic utopianism, – we find no clear evidence at all that organic food is either more safe or more nutritious than conventional food. The most comprehensive meta-analysis of these claims to date was published by Stanford University School of Medicine in September 2012. The study ‘did not find evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or carry fewer health risks than conventional alternatives’ (that’s a quote from the above-linked ‘Organic Marketing Report’).
The authors of the Organic Marketing Report have little to say about the broader environmental claims made by the organic food industry, because they’ve found from their own market research that the industry sees that health and safety concerns are the main drivers of consumer organic purchasing. So the focus of the industry has been on driving home the message that conventional food is unhealthy if not dangerous, and less nutritious. This message is succeeding in spite of a complete lack of scientific support. People should, I think, be more annoyed than they currently are about a campaign of exaggeration and misinformation that is in no way aligned to the evidence.
I should point out that, while many organic growers are sincere in their belief that they’re producing safer foods, the fact is that using ‘natural’ fertilisers and pesticides is not necessarily safer. David Waltner-Toews provides a salutary example in his excellently-titled book The Origin of Feces:
In spring 2011, a mutant, severely pathogenic, and antibiotic-resistant strain of E coli spread across 13 countries in Europe, sickening more than 3000 people and killing 48. The normal home for all E coli species, most of which are law-abiding, contributing members of society, is in the intestinal tracts of warm-blooded animals – that is, in excrement. This epidemic, however, was spread through fresh sprouts from an organic farm in Germany. The original contamination source was identified as fenugreek seeds from Egypt. The genetic make-up of the strain of E coli includes material last seen in sub-Saharan Africa.
Waltner-Toews isn’t trying to bag organic farming here – this is about the only mention he makes about organics in his book. As one of the world’s foremost experts on shit, or manure if you prefer, his concern is to educate us on the enormous complexity of the ‘shit cycle’, and its potential for harm as well as good. It’s a complexity that, I suspect, few commercial organic producers are aware of, though they’re dedicated to the idea that their naturally-fertilised produce is safer than conventional stuff. Sadly, food regulators have been conned into believing this, and organic foods, like naturopathic ‘medicines’, are nowhere near as rigorously checked and tested as their conventional counterparts. More than thirty years’ experience of studying manure and fecal-borne infections has convinced Waltner-Toews that these fecal-borne infections are becoming more frequent and more dangerous because global in their reach, due to the internationalism of modern agribusiness. The lack of monitoring of ‘organic’ production with its ‘safe’ natural fertilisers and pesticides is arguably a greater threat to global health than conventional production, which is well-regulated and heavily scrutinised, at least in the west.
environmental impact
Probably the most important claim made by the organic movement, though not as attention-grabbing as the health and safety claims, is that it is more sustainable and has less of an environmental impact than conventional farming and food production. This is, of course, a very difficult claim to analyse because of the enormous variations within conventional food production, but let’s look at some problems with the claim. First, if the organic marketeers succeed in their clear aim of taking over the world, there will be a problem of space. Small-scale backyard organic producers often con themselves into thinking ‘if I can do it, the world can’, but this is a false logic. In my own small backyard I’ve grown – ‘organically’ I suppose – lettuce and spinach and rocket and tomatoes and quinces and almonds and a whole range of herbs, and if I wasn’t such a slackarse I could produce much more, but the fact is that I work for a living, and increasingly my burgeoning neighbourhood is becoming stacked with medium to high-density housing for corporate types who have no time for gardening even if they had an interest, and they have no gardens to garden in anyway. And I suspect a high and growing percentage of these young corporate types would swear by ‘organic’ food. So just a clear-eyed view of the square kilometre or so around my home tells me feeding the multitude with organics would be quite a feat. As James Mitchell Crow reports, in the science magazine Cosmos, ‘Yields drop when switching to organic, and there isn’t enough organic fertiliser to go around anyway’. As long-time organic farmer Raul Adamchauk (one of the world’s foremost experts on organic farming) puts it:
The challenge for organic agriculture is to help solve the global issues of feeding people in the face of climate change and with increasing population… On some level, it becomes clear that organic agriculture isn’t going to do that by itself. No matter how you figure it, there aren’t enough animals making enough waste to fertilise more than a small fraction of the cropland that we need.
Much more land, therefore, would have to be dedicated to agriculture, with consequences for forestation and biodiversity – and then there’s the fertiliser problem. There are solutions, but the organic movement’s ideological negativity towards biotechnology will block them for the foreseeable future.
These global problems hold little interest, however, for most urban organic consumers. They’ve largely swallowed the negative message that conventional food is both unhealthy and environmentally damaging. For some, it’s part of a whole ideology of anti-modernity – the modern world is toxically chemical and we need to get back to nature.
But conventional food production, like science, never stands still. Over the past 50 years, during which the world’s population has doubled, food production has increased by 300%, though land taken up with such production has increased by only 12%. These astonishing statistics describe the results of the green revolution begun by Norman Borlaug in the sixties and still ongoing. The green revolution saved millions of lives, and could even be ‘blamed’ for contemporary obesity problems. Here are some more statistics: In 1960, the world’s population stood at just over 3 billion, and the average calorie consumption per person per day was 2189 (according to the UN Dept of Economic and Social Affairs). By 2010 the population was near 7 billion, and the average consumption had risen to 2830. Yields per hectare of rice, wheat, maize and other cereals have been spectacular, and these increases have been attributed more or less equally to improved irrigation, improved seeds and more effective synthetic fertiliser. There have been downsides of course, but biotechnological solutions, if they could be applied, would greatly improve the situation. They include not only pest-resistant and higher-yielding GMOs, but such exciting developments as precision agriculture, an automated agricultural system which restricts pesticide and fertiliser use to those areas of a crop that need them, reducing wastage to a minimum.
The green revolution has been far more beneficial than harmful, and the harms have been exaggerated by the ideologues and marketeers of the organic movement, but organic techniques have been effective in many areas, especially in low-tech farming. The real problem isn’t organic farming per se, it’s ideology, ignorance and sometimes downright dishonesty. Almost all the food we eat has been genetically modified – especially if you’re a vegetarian. It was through playing around with modifications and noting recessive and dominant traits in peas that Mendel discovered genes, that’s to say, he discovered just what it was that we’d been manipulating for millennia. We have transformed the food we eat to make it more tasty and filling and life-giving, though for centuries we barely knew what we were doing. The ‘nature’ that some of us want to go back to is entirely mythical. And we’re not being poisoned by our food, we’re too smart and determined to thrive for that.
aerosinusitis
it’s all about Boyle’s Law, apparently (P1V1 = P2V2)
Aerosinusitis, also called barosinusitis, sinus squeeze or sinus barotrauma is a painful inflammation and sometimes bleeding of the membrane of the paranasal sinus cavities, normally the frontal sinus. It is caused by a difference in air pressures inside and outside the cavities.
The above quote is from Wikipedia, and it describes something I experienced on two flights recently (see previous post), though I experienced it, or felt I experienced it, in the ears (I’ve learned not to trust my own perceptions). On the first flight, I experienced a build-up of pressure until a sudden change as of a bubble bursting in some inner cavity, and then everything was fine. I’ve had similar, but less intense, experiences in a car when driving up into the hills near my home. In fact, they’ve been so mild that I’ve often looked forward to them as a physical sensation, and I know it’s common because people would ask around – have your ears popped yet? On my second flight, the pressure built up again on the descent, and I fully expected the bubble to burst as it always did. But the pain just increased, to an excruciating level, so that my face was all scrunched up and I was gasping, squealing and whimpering like a pup. By the time we landed, though, the worst of the pain was gone, and it gradually got better over the next hour or so, and although I could still ‘feel’ it 24 hours later, it was more a memory of a feeling than the thing itself. I don’t know whether my pain was severe or relatively mild as I’ve never felt other people’s pain. This was one of the first things I had ‘deep’ thoughts about as a child. When I was nine or ten years old I fell, while running, and bashed my shin against the edge of our front porch, and I still think that was the most extreme pain I’ve ever felt in my life. I screamed and screamed, and amongst the comforting remarks came the inevitable ‘come on now, stop squealing, it’s not that bad’. Of course this made me angry and resentful but it also raised the questions, ‘am I over-reacting? Would others react like this in the same circumstances? Would they feel the same pain? How could we ever know?’ And along with those questions was one that always ate at me, and probably still does – can I control my pain, can I obliterate it with the power of my mind? I’d sell my soul, FWIW, for total control. But that’s a rather too large side-issue for this post. The Wikipedia article, though, does classify aerosinusitis in terms of pain, along with other more measurable symptoms:
Grade I includes cases with mild transient sinus discomfort without changes visible on X-ray. Grade II is characterized by severe pain for up to 24 h, with some mucosal thickening on X-ray. Patients with grade III have severe pain lasting for more than 24 h and X-ray shows severe mucosal thickening or opacification of the affected sinus; epistaxis or subsequent sinusitis may be observed.
Annoyingly, my own intense but transitory experience doesn’t fit into any of those grades. I also find that this extremely technical article makes no mention at all of ear pain. Much of the focus is on the frontal sinuses, situated behind the brows and connected to the nose or nasal meatus, which naturally makes me uncertain about where my pain was located. Interestingly, the frontal sinuses still haven’t come into existence at birth, and aren’t fully developed until adolescence, and some 5% of people don’t even have them, which just complicates matters for me. As is mentioned above, the frontal sinuses are part of a whole labyrinth of hollows, bones, cartilaginous membranes and passageways known as the paranasal cavities. I’m hoping that the inner ear, or more accurately the middle ear cavity – technically called the tympanic cavity, is also part of that.
Though ‘ear-popping’ seems to be commonplace, aerosinusitis usually occurs in people who have head colds, or as the article puts it, it’s ‘typically preceded by an upper respiratory tract infection or allergy’. Of course, with my bronchiectasis, I’m effectively in a more or less permanent state of infection, so this may be a problem for me every time I fly.
So, what remedy? Well, the problem for me seems to be with the tympanic cavity or eustachian tube on one side. When I was eight, I perforated my ear drum and had to have an operation. I was told afterwards that I should never hold my nose tight while blowing it, as people do (making that horrible honking nose), as this might damage my eardrum. I remember being fascinated by this connection between the nose and the ears, and of course I’ve always followed the doctor’s advice. I didn’t want to blow my brains out of my ears.
Wikipedia suggests using decongestants or painkillers for mild forms of barotrauma, as does this useful site, which deals more with popping ears. First and foremost, though, it suggests gargling with warm salt water, which was my mother’s advice for many medical problems (she was a nurse).
I’m resisting any description of what I went through as ‘mild’.
Working the eustachian tube or tympanic cavity seems to be a good idea, for example by regular swallowing, chewing gum, sucking sweets, yawning, etc.
Sudafed is highly recommended. I’ll bear that in mind next time.
acupuncture promotion in australia
I tried to find a picture of the chi energy system online, but guess what, nothing to be found. Here’s a chi-reflexology map instead – from the Australian College of Chi-Reflexology, no less!
On the ever-reliable US-based NeuroLogica blog, Steven Novella reports on an interesting case of acupuncture promotion here in Oz, via Rachel Dunlop. As Novella reports, acupuncture has been studied many times before, and Cosmos, our premier science mag, did a story on the procedure a while back, reporting no evidence of any benefits except in the notoriously vague areas of back pain and headaches.
Not surprisingly, lower back pain was one of the conditions that supposedly benefited from acupuncture, according to media hype about the latest study. The trouble is, this study was being reported on before being published and peer reviewed, which, to put it mildly, is highly irregular and raises obvious questions. The Sydney Morning Herald is the offending news outlet, and Dr Michael Ben-Meir the over-enthusiastic researcher. As the article points out, Ben-Meir is already a ‘convert’ to acupuncture, having used it for some time in acute cases at two Melbourne hospitals. That’s fine, if a bit unorthodox, but it doesn’t accord with other findings, and there are therefore bound to be questions about methodology.
One of the obvious difficulties is that acupuncture can hardly be applied to patients without them knowing it. It’s a much more hands-on and ‘invasive’ experience than swallowing a tablet, and this will undoubtedly have a psychological effect. It seems to me, just off the top of my head, that acupuncture, with its associated rituals, its aura of antiquity and its oriental cultural cachet, would carry greater weight as a placebo than, say, a homeopathic pill. But in fact I don’t have to speculate here, as there is much clinical evidence that injections have a greater placebo effect than pills, and big pills have a greater placebo effect than small ones. So it doesn’t greatly surprise me that people will report a lessening, and even a dramatic lessening, of acute pain, after an acupuncture treatment, however illegitimate. I presume there are illegitimate treatments, because the ‘key meridional points’ where the needles are applied are precisely know by legitimate acupuncturists, and they apply their treatments with rigorous accuracy.
Well, actually there’s a big question as to whether or not there are any legitimate acupuncturists, because acupuncture is based on an energy system known as ‘chi’, which supposedly has meridional points at which needles can be inserted quite deeply into the skin, but there’s no evidence whatever that such an energy system exists, let alone about how such a system might function – for example, its mode of energy transmission (whatever ‘energy’ might mean in this case). Considering that we know a great deal about the autoimmune system and the central and peripheral nervous systems, it seems astonishing that this other bodily system has gone undetected by scientists for so long, and especially in recent times, with our ultra-sophisticated monitoring devices. When you look up ‘chi, sometimes spelt ‘qi’ or with other variants, you’ll find nothing more specific than ‘energy’, ‘life force’ or something similar – nothing corpuscular or in any sense measurable by modern medicine. Even so, researchers into acupuncture have come up with an attempt to measure its efficacy by comparing it to ‘sham acupuncture’ in clinical trials. Sham acupuncture uses the ‘wrong’ meridians and the ‘wrong’ depths to which the needle goes.
But herein lies an obvious problem. Sham acupuncturists insert needles only millimetres deep, while real acupuncturists put their needles between one and three or four centimetres deep: ‘Depth of insertion will depend on nature of the condition being treated, the patients’ size, age, and constitution, and upon the acupuncturists’ style or school’, according to an acupuncture site I visited at random. These are rather wide parameters, but the point that interests me is this. If you don’t put your needle in deep enough, you won’t make contact with the chi that needs to be stimulated or other wise modified to heal the patient. So goes the rationale, surely. It’s like, if you don’t put the needle for a standard vaccination in the right place, you’ll miss the vein. But veins are clearly real. If you go dissecting, you’ll find veins and arteries and nerves and muscle and fat and so on. But you won’t find chi. Yet, apparently it does have real existence. It’s between one and four centimetres down, according to real acupuncturists, depending on the above-mentioned variables (and no doubt many others).
So we can’t actually see it, or find it on dissection, but it’s locatable in space, vaguely. Or is it that chi is everywhere in the body but the right kind of chi, the bit that’s causing the pain and needs to be treated with needles at certain precise meridional points, is at a certain distance from the surface of the skin?
It all begins to sound a bit like theology, doesn’t it?
Here’s the ‘take-home’ for me. If you read about treatments that ‘work’ but you get virtually nothing about the mechanism of action, as is the case, for example, with homeopathy and acupuncture, be very skeptical. In the end I’m not impressed with clinical trials that show a ‘real effect’, even a startling one, because I know about regression to the mean, and I particularly know about the placebo effect. I want ‘proof of concept’. In this case proof of the concept of chi and of meridians. I’ve heard homeopaths defend their pills on TV recently by claiming that, ‘whatever the mechanism, clinical trials consistently prove that this treatment works’, and I can’t be bothered chasing up those clinical trials and testing their legitimacy, I go straight to the concepts and processes behind the treatment – the law of similars, the law of infinitesimals, and don’t forget succussion. These concepts are so intrinsically absurd that we needn’t bother looking at the clinical data. If there are positive results, they haven’t been produced by homeopathy. The fact that homeopaths themselves are largely uninterested in the mechanisms is a dead giveaway. You’d think that the law of infinitesimals and the law of similars would surely have myriad applications far beyond their current ones. They would revolutionise science and technology, if only they were real (and they’d also render obsolete much that we currently know).
The same goes for acupuncture, and chi. If this bodily system were real, and chi could be captured in a test tube, and its constituents examined and isolated under a microscope, how revolutionary that would be. How transformative. Chi pills, chi soap, chi breakfast cereal…
Ah but I’m thinking like one of those limited westerners, so modern, so smug, so lacking in the insight of the ancients…
food irradiation and the organic food movement
Oh,rats – they’ve exposed the conspiracy!
Food irradiation is a well-known process for preserving food and eliminating or reducing bacteria. It’s used for much the same purpose that pressure cooking of tinned food is used, or the pasteurization of milk. All food used by NASA astronauts in space is irradiated, to reduce the possibility of food-borne illness.
advantages and disadvantages of irradiation
According to the US Department of Health’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), irradiation, if applied correctly, has been clearly shown to reduce or eliminate food pathogens, without reducing the nutritional value of the food. It should be noted that irradiation doesn’t make food radioactive. I’ll look at the science of irradiation shortly.
Of course it’s not a cure-all. For example, it doesn’t halt the ageing process, and can make older fruit look fresher than it is. The reduction in nutritional value of the food, caused by the ageing process, can be masked by irradiation. It can also kill off bacteria that produce an odour that alerts you that the food is going off. Also, it doesn’t get rid of neurotoxins like those produced by Clostridium botulinum. Irradiation will kill off the bacteria, but not the toxins produced by the bacteria prior to irradiation.
how does food irradiation work?
Three different types of irradiation technology are used, using gamma rays (cobalt-60), electron beams and x-rays. The idea is the same with each, the use of ionising radiation to break chemical bonds in molecules within bacteria and other microbes, leading to their death or greatly inhibiting their growth. The amount of ionising radiation is carefully measured, and the radiation takes place in a special room or chamber for a specified duration.
When radioactive cobalt 60 is the energy source, it’s contained in two stainless steel tubes, one inside the other, called ‘source pencils’. They’re kept on a rack in an underground water chamber, and raised out of the water when required. The water isn’t radioactive. Food products move along a conveyor belt into a room where they’re exposed to the rack containing the source pencils. Gamma rays (photons) pass through the tubes and treat the food. The cobalt 60 process is generally used in the USA.
An Electron-beam Linear Accelerator generates, concentrates and accelerates electrons to up to 99% of light-speed.These electron beams are scanned over the product. The machine uses energy levels of 5, 7.5 or 10 MeV (million electron volts). Again the product is usually guided under the beam by a conveyor system at a predetermined speed to obtain the appropriate dosage. This will clearly vary with product type and thickness.
The X-ray process starts with an electron beam accelerator targeting electrons on a metal plate. The energy that isn’t absorbed is converted into x-rays, which, like gamma rays, can penetrate food containers more than 40cms thick. Shipping containers, for example.
Most of the radiation used in these processes passes through the food without being absorbed. It’s the absorbed radiation, of course, that has the effect, destroying microbes and so extending shelf life, and slowing down the ripening of fruits and vegetables. The potential is there for food irradiation to replace chemical fumigants and fungicides used after harvest. It also has the potential, through the use of higher doses, to kill contaminating bacteria in meat, such as Salmonella.
Food irradiation is a cold treatment. It doesn’t significantly raise the temperature of the food, and this minimises nutrient loss or changes in texture, colour and flavour. The energy it uses is too low to cause food to become radioactive. It has been compared to light passing through a window. Food irradiation uses the same principle as pasteurization, and can be described as pasteurization by energy instead of heat, or cold pasteurization..
the use of food irradiation in Australia
Due largely to fears about irradiation having to do with radioactivity and nuclear energy, the process isn’t used as widely in Australia (or indeed the USA) as it could be. Irradiation is used in some 50 countries, but the level of usage varies for each country, from very limited in Austria and other EU countries, to a very widespread usage in Brazil. Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) summarises our situation thus:
In Australia and New Zealand, only herbs and spices, herbal infusions, tomatoes, capsicums and some tropical fruits can be irradiated.
FSANZ has established that there is a technological need to irradiate these foods, and that there are no safety concerns or significant loss of nutrients when irradiating these foods.
Irradiated food or ingredients must be labelled clearly as having been treated by ionising radiation.
food irradiation, health and safety
Since 1950 hundreds of studies have been carried out on animals fed with irradiated products, including multi-generational studies. On the basis of these studies, food irradiation has been approved by the World Health Organization, the American Dietetic Association, the Scientific Committee of the European Union and many other national and international monitoring bodies. Of course this hasn’t stopped many individuals and organisations from complaining and campaigning against the practice. Concerns include: chemical changes harmful to the consumer; impairment of flavour; the destruction of more ‘good’ than ‘bad’ bacteria; and that it’s an unnecessary process which runs counter to the movement towards regional product, seasonality and real freshness. I’ve already mentioned other problems, such as that it can mask spoiled food, and that it doesn’t destroy toxins already released by bacteria.
opposition from the organic food movement
Food products must be irradiation-free if they are to certified as ‘organic’, in Australia and elsewhere. Now, I’ve fairly regularly expressed irritation with the ‘organic’ food ideology, most particularly in this post, but I recognise that it appeals to a very diverse set of people, with perhaps a majority simply believing, on faith, that ‘organic’ food will be more nutritious, safer and better for the environment than conventional food. Most of those people wouldn’t know much about food irradiation, but hey, it sounds dodgy, so why not avoid it? I’ve no great argument to make with such people, apart from the old ‘knowledge is power’ arguments, but there are a few individuals and organisations trying to get food irradiation banned, based on what they claim to be evidence. Unsurprisingly, most of these critics are also ‘organic’ food proponents. I’ll look at some criticisms from Eden Organic Foods, a US outfit, which admittedly represents the extreme end of the spectrum (nature before the fall?).
Firstly, in their ‘factsheet’ on irradiation, linked to above (and reprinted verbatim here by another alarmist organisation, the Center for Food Safety), they waste no time in informing us that the beams used are ‘millions of times more powerful than standard medical x-rays’. This sounds pretty scary, but it’s a bogus comparison. Irradiation is designed to kill bugs and bacteria, whereas medical x-rays are for making visible what is invisible to the naked eye. Clearly, the first and foremost concern in testing and studying the technology is to make sure that the chemical changes it induces are safe for humans. Comparisons with medical x-rays are more than irrelevant to this concern, as the author of this factsheet well knows.
Next comes this disturbing claim:
Radiation can do strange things to food, by creating substances called “unique radiolytic products.” These irradiation byproducts include a variety of mutagens – substances that can cause gene mutations, polyploidy (an abnormal condition in which cells contain more than two sets of chromosomes), chromosome aberrations (often associated with cancerous cells), and dominant lethal mutations (a change in a cell that prevents it from reproducing) in human cells. Making matters worse, many mutagens are also carcinogens
Wow. So much for the poor people of Brazil – they’re obviously done for. But how is it that the world’s top scientific agencies missed all these mutagens and carcinogens? Let’s take a closer look.
The term ‘radiolytic products’ simply means the products created by chemical changes that occur when food is irradiated. Similarly, the products created by heat treatment, or simply cooking, might be called ‘thermolytic products’. These are not ‘strange’, they’re quite predictable, for irradiation would be totally ineffective if it didn’t bring about some chemical changes. One of the differences is that radiolytic products are generally undetectable and produce only minor changes in the food compared to the major operation we call cooking. It is, of course, precisely these products that the scientific community scrutinises when determining the safety of irradiated foods.
Interestingly, in an article, dating back to 1999, called ‘Scientific answers to irradiation bugaboos’, for 21st Century Science & Technology magazine, Marjorie Mazel Hecht has this to say:
The July 1986 report of the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST), which reviewed all the research work on food irradiation, defined unique radiolytic products “as compounds that are formed by treating foods with ionizing energy, but are not found normally in any untreated foods and are not formed by other accepted methods of food processing.”
The report states that “on the basis of this definition no unique radiolytic compounds have been found in 30 years of research. Compounds produced in specific foods by ionizing energy have always been found in the same foods when processed by other accepted methods or in other foods” (Vol. 1, p. 15).
This slightly contradicts the factsheet put out by Idaho University’s Radiation Information Network, which acknowledges the existence of such products while insisting on their nugatory nature:
Scientists find the changes in food created by irradiation minor to those created by cooking. The products created by cooking are so significant that consumers can smell and taste them, whereas only a chemist with extremely sensitive lab equipment may be able to detect radiolytic products.
Needless to say, alarmists thrive on these contradictions. So what evidence is there of mutagenic irradiation byproducts? Well, there are radiolytic byproducts of fatty acids in meat, called alkylcyclobutanones (2-ACBs), first detected a few decades ago, and the research done on them seems to be so far inconclusive. A book entitled Food Irradiation Research and Technology, the second edition of which was published last year, states that ‘knowledge about the toxicological properties of 2-ACBs is still scarce’, and that ‘it may be prudent to collect more knowledge on the toxicological and metabolic properties of 2-ACBs in order to quantify a possible risk – albeit minimal.’ The book describes a number of studies on rats and humans, going into more detail than I can comprehend, but the results have been difficult to interpret and generally not easily replicable in other studies, indicating very minute and hard-to-measure effects. No doubt such studies will be ongoing. As far as I know, 2-ACBs are the only products about which there is any concern.
What is obvious though, in looking at the research material available online, is the difference between the caution, skepticism and uncertainty of researchers compared to the adamantine certainty of such critics as the Center for Food Safety.
But what about polyploidy? Polyploid cells contain more than two paired sets of chromosomes. Eukaryotic cells, those of multicellular creatures, are diploid (two sets), and prokaryotic, bacterial cells are haploid (one set). Polyploidy is regarded as a chromosomal aberration, common in many plants and some invertebrates, but relatively rare in humans. However it is present in humans, and the percentage varies from individual to individual, and within individuals from day to day and week to week, depending on a range of factors including diet, age, and even circadian rhythms. Levels of up to 3-4% in human lymphocytes have been found in healthy individuals, though some researchers have claimed much higher percentages, in liver cells. The overall finding so far is that fluctuations in polyploidy are the norm, and no clear correlation has been found so far between these fluctuations and health profiles. It seems that the biological significance of polyploidy isn’t known.
Critics of irradiation have been going on about polyploidy and other mutations supposedly caused by irradiation for decades, and unsurprisingly, some are fanatically obsessed with the issue, accompanying their rants with long reference lists, mostly from like-minded activists. However, the text Safety of irradiated foods, 2nd edition discusses polyploidy in some detail, with particular reference to a study of malnourished Indian children fed irradiated wheat, a study regularly cited by anti-irradiation activists. It turns out that there were many problems with the study. First, not enough cells were counted to validly pinpoint an effect, such as a change in diet. Secondly, polyploidy is notoriously difficult to detect – superimposed diploid cells can be easily mistaken for polyploid cells under a microscope (in fact when two independent observers looked at the same microscope slides, one found 34 polyploid cells, the other found 9). Further, the study only gave group results rather than individual results, so it wasn’t possible to know whether the polyploidy was restricted to one or two individuals rather than spread over the group. Another problem was that the reference or control group was found to have no polyploidy at all, a very strange finding given that other researchers always found some degree of polyploidy in their subjects, regardless of irradiation or other effects. In fact, the study was so poorly written up that it’s impossible to replicate – for example the exact diet given the children wasn’t described. How was the wheat fed to the children?. Presumably it was prepared in some way, but how? The omission is crucial. The study also didn’t take into account the effect of malnutrition itself on chromosomal abnormalities. And so on.
You get the picture, and it’s the same with other claims about mutations and carcinogens. Every time you look into the claims you find the same problems that no doubt other scientific watchdog organisations have found – poorly conducted studies that either can’t be replicated or haven’t survived replication. That, of course is no reason for complacency, and at least the activists can assist, in their sometimes muddle-headed ways, in improving our knowledge of 2-ACBs, polyploidy and other biological effects, just as the creationists who bang on about a lack of transitional forms, or ‘irreducible complexity’, help us to focus on refutations, clarifications and further evidence.
Finally, food irradiation, while clearly not the zappo-horrorshow that activists are determined to make it, doesn’t replace proper handling techniques and a good instinct about food quality. The fact is, though, that it does increase shelf life, and is a useful tool in our increasingly global economy, where food is shipped from here to there and everywhere, in season and out. If you prefer to eat locally, with fresh and seasonal produce, fine, and we can argue about the sustainability of that approach on a worldwide scale, but let’s none of us pretend that food irradiation is other than what it is. Let the evidence, properly evaluated, be your guide.
what is autism and what causes it?
The term ‘autism’ was coined in the 1940s by two physicians working independently of each other, Hans Asperger in Austria and Leo Kanner in the USA, to describe a syndrome the key feature of which was a problem with interacting with others in ‘normal’ ways. Sounds vague, but the problem was anything but wishy-washy to these individuals’ parents and families, and over time a more detailed profile has built up.
The term itself is from the Greek autos, or ‘self’, because those with the syndrome had clear difficulties in interpreting others’ moods and responses, resulting in a withdrawn, often antisocial state. Autistic kids often avoid eye contact and are all at sea over the simplest communication.
Already though, I feel I’m saying too much. When describing autism, it’s common to use words like ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ or ‘some’, because the symptoms are seemingly so disparate. Much of what follows relies on the neurologist V S Ramachandran’s book The tell-tale brain, especially chapter 5, ‘Where is Steven? The riddle of autism’.
Autistic symptoms can be categorised in two major groups, social-cognitive and sensorimotor. The social-cognitive symptoms include mental aloneness and a lack of contact with the world of other humans, an inability to engage in conversation and a lack of emotional empathy. Also a lack of any overt ‘playfulness’ or sense of make-believe in childhood. These symptoms can be ‘countered’ by heightened, sometimes obsessive interest in the inanimate world – e.g. the memorising of ostensibly useless data, such as lists of phone numbers.
On the sensorimotor side, symptoms include over-sensitivity and intolerance to noise, a fear of change or novelty, and an intense devotion to routine. There’s also a physical repetitiveness of actions and performances, and regular rocking motions.
These two types of symptoms raise an obvious question – how are the two types connected to each other? We’ll return to that.
Another motor symptom, which Ramachandran thinks is key, is a difficulty in physically imitating the actions of others. This has led him to pursue the hypothesis that autism is essentially the result of a deficiency in the mirror neuron system.
In recent years there’s been a lot of excitement about mirror neurons – possibly too much, according to some neurologists. A mirror neuron is one that fires not only when we perform an action but also when we observe it being performed by others. They’ve been found to act in mammals and also, it seems, in birds, and in humans they’ve been found in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the primary somatosensory cortex and the inferior parietal cortex. It’s easier, however, to locate them than it is to determine their function. Clearly, to describe them as ‘responsible’ for empathy, or intention, is to go too far. As Patricia Churchland points out, ‘a neuron is just a neuron’, and what we describe as empathy or intention will likely involve a plethora of high-order processes and connections, in which mirror neurons will play their part.
With that caveat in mind, let’s continue with Ramachandran’s speculations on autism and mirror neurons. First, we’ll need to be reminded of the term ‘theory of mind’, used regularly in psychology. It’s basically the idea that we attribute to others the same sorts of intentions and desires that we have because of the assumption that they, like us, have that internal feeling and processing and regulating system we call a ‘mind’. A sophisticated theory of mind is one of the most distinctive features of the human species, one which gives us a unique kind of social intelligence. That autism would be related to theory-of-mind deficiencies seems a reasonable assumption, so what is the brain circuitry behind theory of mind, and how do mirror neurons fit into this picture?
Although neuro-imaging has revealed that autistic children have larger brains with larger ventricles (brain cavities) and notably different activity within the cerebellum, this hasn’t helped researchers much, because autism sufferers don’t present any of the usual symptoms of cerebellum damage. It could be that these changes are simply the side effects of genes which produce autism. Some researchers felt it was better to focus on mirror neurons straight-off, as obvious suspects, and to see how they fired and where they connected in particular situations. They used EEG (electroencephalography) as a non-invasive way to observe mirror neuron activity. They focused on the suppression of mu waves, a type of brain wave. It has long been known that mu waves are suppressed when a person makes any volitional movement, and more recently it has been discovered that the same suppression occurs when we watch others performing such movements.
So researchers used EEG (involving electrodes placed on the scalp) to monitor neuronal activity in a medium-functioning autistic child, Justin. Justin exhibited a suppressed mu wave, as expected, when asked to make voluntary movements. However, he didn’t show the same suppression when watching others perform those movements, as ‘neurotypical’ children do. It seemed that his motor-command system was functioning more or less normally, but his mirror-neuron system was deficient. This finding has been replicated many times, using a variety of techniques, including MEG (magnetoencephalography). fMRI, and TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation). Reading about all these techniques would be a mind-altering experience in itself.
According to Ramachandran, all these confirmations ‘provide conclusive evidence that the [mirror neuron] hypothesis is correct.’ It certainly helps to explain why a subset of autistic children have trouble with metaphors and literality. They have difficulty separating the physical and the referential, a separation that mirror neurons appear to mediate somehow.
A well-developed theory of mind which can anticipate the behaviour of others is clearly a feature of understanding our own minds better. In Ramachandran’s words:
If the mirror-neuron system underlies theory of mind and if theory of mind in normal humans is supercharged by being applied inward, towards the self, this would explain why autistic individuals find social interaction and strong self-identification so difficult, and why so many autistic children have a hard time correctly using the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ in conversation. They may lack a mature-enough self-representation to understand the distinction.
Of course, tons more can be said about the ‘mirror network’ and tons more research remains to be done, but there are many promising signs. For example, the findings about lack of mu wave suppression could be used as a diagnostic tool for the early detection of autism, and some interesting work is being done on the use of biofeedback to treat the disorder. Biofeedback is a process whereby physiological signals picked up by a machine from the brain or body of a subject are represented to the subject in such a way that he or she might be able to affect or manipulate that signal by a conscious change of behaviour or thinking. Experiments have been done to show that subjects can alter their own brain waves through this process. Some experimental work is also being done with drugs such as MDMA (otherwise known as the party drug ‘ecstacy’) which appear to enhance empathy through their action on neurotransmitter release.
So that’s a very brief introduction to autism. Hopefully I’ll come back to it in the future to explore the progress being made in understanding and treating the syndrome.
can your shoes help you run faster?
time to ditch your adidas microbounce plus trainers for neutral to underpronating runners, with lightweight heel-to-toe bounce technology, etc etc – it’s all just a load of expensive shite unless you’re deeply into the status doo-doo
Some years ago, when I was a bit more financially solvent than I am these days, I went to a gym for a while, and even employed a personal trainer. I learned from that experience, thanks to some simple exercises the trainer put me through, and my own quick development through these exercises, that, once I’d gotten this kick start, I didn’t need the expense of a gym, or a personal trainer for that matter, which is just as well, as I soon went broke and abandoned both.
Since then I’ve been using a combo of my trainer’s tips and some CSIRO-recommended exercises to stay moderately in shape at home, happily far from the sight of buffed-up men hefting obscene weights, not to mention bubble-butted women with sweat sparkling from their flawless sun-tinted flesh..
Anyway, one of the things that sometimes worried me when I turned up for gym was my footwear. I noticed that most of the inhabitants wore all the ‘right’ gear including what looked like the latest state-of-the-art top-brand ‘gym shoes’ or running shoes or whatever. I wore a pair of $10 canvas slip-ons, and I always expected the trainer to query them, though I’d also heard or read somewhere that all these expensive ‘scientifically tested’ exercise shoes were a load of malarkey, and you’re possibly better off with good old-fashioned plimsolls, or even nothing at all…
So it was with some interest that I listened to a little segment on a recent science show podcast, dealing precisely with this subject. An English researcher, Mick Wilkinson, who’s also a keen amateur runner, has been looking at running barefoot v running shod, and he ran a half-marathon barefoot in 2011 just to test things out. He came out of it more or less unscathed in spite of some less than barefoot-friendly surfaces.
As to the evidence, much of it was a summary of what a Professor Lieberman of Harvard has found, findings published in Nature and a recent issue of New Scientist. Basically, Lieberman has found that we are born – that’s to say, evolutionarily adapted – to run, considering our skeleton and muscles, and issues of endurance and heat loss (the latter being an obvious consideration in going barefoot). An analysis of ‘peak impact forces and the rate at which those forces are absorbed by the body’ indicates that barefoot running, because it favours a ‘forefoot landing’, a type of foot strike pattern that’s associated with ‘a lower loading rate’ (presumably meaning less overall pressure), is less jarring than its alternative.
Looking at joint movements and rotational forces around the ankles and the knees, the evidence is that, with barefoot running, forces around the ankles are increased, forces around the knees are decreased. This is very interesting to me, as I stopped jogging years ago because one of my knees would stiffen up every time I did it. I was running in fairly basic running shoes, but more importantly to my mind I was running on a hard gravel track. Years later when I did a bit of jogging on grass I didn’t have a problem. Generally though I hate jogging and much prefer cycling, with a nice café at the end.
But what about the effect on the ankles? According to Lieberman the evolution of structures on the rear of the leg, the Achilles, the calf and the soleus (a powerful muscle in the lower calf) have generally evolved to cope with these stresses on the ankle region. More research needs to be done, but there are some pretty serious difficulties, as Wilkinson points out:
So we’ve got biomechanical aspects linking forces, we know that forces are theoretically linked to some kinds of injuries, but that’s where it stops. What is missing is the next piece of the puzzle which would be the randomised control prospective studies examining injury rates in people who are learning to run barefoot, people who are learning to run in shoes. But the design of the study would be so complex, it would be prohibitive. I mean, you’d have to get people who were matched for training history, matched for age, matched for injury status. In fact it would probably be better to start off with people who had never run at all and just say, right, randomly allocate you into a group who are going to learn to run in shoes, you’re going to learn to run barefoot, and then track them over a very long period of time to find out what injury rates are per so many thousand miles. But again, it’s so difficult to operationalise a study like that, probably why one hasn’t been done.
In any case these studies wouldn’t so much answer the question of whether you run faster in shoes, as whether you run better – that’s to say, with less general impact on the body. It, not quite the same thing, though they are connected. And obviously there are hazards in running barefoot in modern urban environments. But there doesn’t seem to be much evidence to support all the advertising claptrap trying to get you to buy ultra-expensive running shoes. In fact, there’s been little noticeable difference in times for running marathons – the real test for shoes v bare feet – in spite of, not only high-tech footwear but all the other-high tech analysis in terms of diet, running technique and so forth. Wilkinson tells us that the American distance runner Steve Prefontaine still holds the American marathon record from the early seventies (Prefontaine was killed in a car crash in 1975, aged 24), and he always wore a standard pair of plimsolls.
So it looks like another case of advertising, and dare I say pseudo-science, winning out over the evidence..
‘organic’ food – the greatest scam in the west
foison or poison?
[there is a] fashion to talk as if art were something different from nature, so that things artificial should be separated from things natural, as differing totally in kind… Things artificial differ from things natural not in form or essence, but only in the efficient.
Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum, 1623
Someone at work offers me some food, from a cooking class she teaches. She describes it as very healthful, ‘and organic too’, she proudly confides. ‘Well of course, it’s organic, it’s food,’ I mildly reply. ‘Well, yes, but you know what I mean,’ she says.
Unfortunately, I did know what she meant. She meant ‘organic’ in the cheap, shallow, duplicitous, marketing way, not in the deep, scientific way.
And so I begin a piece that is long overdue, and which, I’m sure, will not win me any friends, assuming anybody reads it at all.
‘Organic’ food has been getting my goat for a few years now, and it’s time I laid out my objections based on the evidence I’ve accumulated over the years, while at the same time looking again at the evidence, just in case there’s something redeeming about this labelling and marketing practice that I’ve missed.
First, though, I’ll talk about marketing, which is the real focus of my ire. The term ‘organic food’, as so many people have pointed out, is tautologous. All food is organic, that is an unarguable, scientific fact. So it takes a deal of hubris, and, I reluctantly admit, a deal of marketing genius, to be able to sell a product and a process intended, quite deliberately, to cast doubt on the health and nutritional value of 99.999% of the food we eat. This is the scam of all scams, and what’s more, it has been entirely successful. Usually when we think of scams, we think of those who got caught – the Bernie Madoffs and Jeff Skillings of the world, the bad and the blameworthy who make us feel better for not being like them. Their scams are over, lessons learnt, systems tightened, vigilance heightened, but there’s no end in sight for the organic food scam. It’ll be with us for as long as the words ‘toxic chemicals’ have currency, and that’ll be around the twelfth of forever. What’s more, there’s no ‘body’ to blame, no obvious perpetrator or mastermind. In that way, and in more than a few others, it’s a bit like religion.
I note that most people I know who swear by ‘organic’ food are also opposed to GMOs, suspicious of mainstream medicine, and dabblers in various pseudo-scientific approaches to health and well-being. They certainly place more value in ‘the fruits of the earth’ than the products of the lab. This article of faith has been labelled ‘the naturalistic fallacy’ by sceptics, though philosophers might quibble about that – as would I, having struggled over many years with that particular concept, introduced by philosopher George Moore more than a century ago. Probably better to label this way of thinking as ‘the appeal to nature’. In any case, it’s certainly an example of fallacious reasoning, as the insightful Francis Bacon was one of the first to point out.
My many qualms about the ‘organic’ food movement have been reinforced by a listen to the ever-reliable Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid piece on the subject, and I’ll use that as the basis, or at least the starting point, for this post. In fact, you might well be better off listening to Dunning’s analysis, which will doubtless be more comprehensive and concise than mine. I’m mainly writing this to get the information and the understanding of the issues more clearly lodged in my head.
The generally understood scientific term for an organic compound is one that’s produced by living entities. Chemically, it’s a carbon-based molecule with a carbon-hydrogen bond. Coal is an organic compound, and so, interestingly, is plastic. If the term ‘organic’ is used in any other way, you should be sceptical. My scepticism compels me to use the term ‘organic’ food, with scare quotes, to highlight this dubious use.
In order to be certified ‘organic’, food and agricultural products must be produced under a set of guidelines which vary from country to country, and which are regulated in different ways in different places. This Wikipedia article provides some of the guidelines common to most western countries:
- no human sewage sludge fertilizer used in cultivation of plants or feed of animals[1]
- avoidance of synthetic chemical inputs not on the National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances (e.g. fertilizer, pesticides, antibiotics, food additives, etc.), genetically modified organisms, irradiation, and the use of sewage sludge;
- use of farmland that has been free from prohibited synthetic chemicals for a number of years (often, three or more);
- keeping detailed written production and sales records (audit trail);
- maintaining strict physical separation of organic products from non-certified products;
- undergoing periodic on-site inspections.
So let’s look at the first three of these, which, presumably, are key to producing goods superior to, or healthier (and tastier) than goods that don’t earn the ‘organic’ label.
The issue of sludge fertiliser and its potential dangers isn’t really an ‘organic’ food issue, it’s one for any agricultural product. If you use sludge fertiliser, and it causes contamination to humans or animals, obviously there will be consequences for your business and yourself, whether you’re trying to produce ‘organic’ food or not. The ‘freedom from sewage sludge’ label that ‘organic’ foods are presumably entitled to display appears to be meaningless unless non-‘organic’ producers are all using the stuff. And even if they were, the issue is one of contaminants, not sewage sludge per se. I don’t know if this is an issue in Australia, but there is no evidence, out of the USA, that anyone is being contaminated by non-‘organic’ foods. No matter what the complexities of applying sludge in farming – organic or inorganic, treatment methods, etc – it is irrelevant to the ‘organic’ food issue. It appears to be used for ideological reasons, to hint that, somehow, somewhere, the use of untreated or improperly treated sludge is slowly killing us.
The second guideline, which for some reason incorporates the first guideline, rendering that guideline superfluous, is the key guideline to understanding the psychology of ‘organic’ food, and the ‘appeal to nature’ fallacy upon which it’s based. ‘Organic’ food producers must not use ‘synthetic’ fertilisers or pesticides ‘not on the National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances’, in other words nothing synthetic of any kind.
‘Organic’ producers and marketers like to promote their products as fertilizer and pesticide free. This is complete bullshit. Virtually all agricultural products are subject to pest infestation and this needs to be dealt with, one way or another. Methods also need to be employed to enrich the soil, to render it more fertile. The only difference between ‘organic’ producers and the rest is that ‘organic’ producers are constrained by their anti-science ideology. Synthetic fertilizer, for example, involves the production of the key nutrients for plant growth – nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus – on a commercial scale. ‘Organic’ farming involves the same nutrients, but delivered the hard way, through fish and bone meal, earthworm castings and the like. The only difference is that these materials are more costly and less efficient, as they deliver a much lesser and more variable load of the nutrient per volume, and are thus less straightforward to use accurately and systematically, and are far costlier to transport. The use of synthetic fertilisers, as I’ve pointed out many times, has, with the improvement through hybridisation of particular grains and fruits, increased crop yields by ten times and more, and has saved the lives of millions since their introduction in the sixties.
But the real point here is the duplicity of labelling synthetic fertilizer, which is able to isolate and concentrate the required nutrients in the most efficient way, as ‘chemical’ (with the implication that it just might be toxic), as if the fertilizers used in ‘organic’ farming are somehow free from chemistry.
The third guideline mentioned above really shows how committed the ‘organic’ marketers are to scaring people about conventional farming. There is no need to keep conventional farmland free from ‘prohibited synthetical chemicals’ in order to use it for ‘organic’ farming. I wonder what is meant by ‘prohibited’ here? If they’re prohibited by government authorities, then of course you shouldn’t use the land – but then why would any farmer use such substances, thus poisoning her own produce? If they’re prohibited solely by ‘organic’ regulations, then they’re simply ideologically driven, arbitrary, and a product of the ‘appeal to nature’ fallacy.
As Dunning points out, ‘organic’ products are perfectly healthy and safe, but there’s no reason to believe they’re healthier and safer than non-‘organic’ products. I personally prefer to avoid eating too many processed food products because I think it’s better for our bodies to expend energy on the process of digestion, and because many processed foods have added sugar which our bodies don’t need and which can cause problems. I think there’s a fair amount of good scientific evidence for this approach to diet. I’ve not as yet encountered any scientific evidence for the benefits of ‘organic’ foods, except that they’re generally unprocessed and vegetarian, which is mostly good (don’t forget, though that a diet of potato chips is also vegetarian).
A perhaps more subtle, and superficially more cogent argument for ‘organic’ foods is the environmental argument. Okay, so conventional food isn’t poisoning us or giving us cancer or heart disease, but you gotta admit that it’s unsustainable. ‘Organic’ food really cares for the soil, it’s based on a deep connection with nature, a respect for the land, it gives as good as it takes, it’s about long-term sustainability. Conventional farming is, by contrast, instrumentalist, exploitative, impersonal, short-term, destructive etc etc.
This is a simplistic and ideological claim, not evidence-based. Firstly, let’s look at how conventional farming obtains its three key nutrients for enriching the soil. Nitrogen is, of course, freely available from the atmosphere and infinitely sustainable. Phosphorus is mined from phosphate rock, of which we have reserves to last centuries. Potassium comes from ancient ocean deposits, of which we have millenia of reserves. Of course these reserves are finite, so seawater extraction is considered a viable alternative, for both potassium and phosphorus. As Dunning points out, this creates a sustainable cycle as plant matter and farm runoff returns to the oceans, but ‘organic’ certification, at least in the US, doesn’t allow sustainable atmospheric and seawater extraction. ‘Organic’ chemical fertiliser can only be sourced from animal waste and other recycled resources, using criteria which are ideological rather than scientific, and so more or less arbitrary. Further, these resources can’t be marshalled in sufficiently commercial quantities to feed large populations, especially in developing countries where there just isn’t the infrastructure to make fertilisation under ‘organic’ guidelines viable on a commercial scale. ‘Organic’ farming is a distinctly western, middle class ideology.
It’s also insulting to conventional farmers to suggest that they’re more exploitative and short-term in their use of their own land. This goes as much for multinational agricultural concerns as for individual farmers. Both groups are interested in long-term viability, for obvious reasons. Crop rotation and other forms of long-term soil management have long been practised by conventional farmers, who must naturally balance these with other production concerns. This is surely grist for the mill for all agriculturalists, as they would wish to reduce the cost of applying fertiliser or herbicides wherever possible.
Returning to the pesticide/herbicide issue, it’s often harder, and more expensive, for ‘organic’ farmers to find ‘natural’ or plant-based chemicals to use instead of synthetic products, and these costs must needs be passed on to consumers. The synthetic products have, of course, been passing health and safety checks for decades. One such chemical, rotenone, a colourless, odourless ketone found in the seeds and stems of a number of plants including the jicama vine, has in recent years been all but abandoned, due to connections found between its use and the incidence of Parkinson’s Disease among farm workers.
I could go on, but hopefully you get the picture. I’ll end, as I began, with the use of language. There are plenty of organic entities, to use the word in its right way, that are poisonous to humans – be they berries or bugs, frogs or sea creatures. A fine example is the fugu fish, with its deadly poison, tetrododoxin, of which quantities are found in the skin, the skeleton, the intestines, the ovaries, and above all the liver. Eaten usually as sashimi (ie raw), it must be prepared by rigorously trained chefs, and even then you can never be sure – which seems to be essential to its charm as a delicacy. To quote from this travel advisor:
Tetrododoxin does not cross the blood-brain barrier, so the victims remain fully conscious while their central nervous system gradually shuts down, first producing dizziness and incoherent speech, then paralysing the muscles. This can lead to asphyxia, and possibly death. (There is no antidote for fugu poisoning).
how to tackle obesity
A little over a year and a half ago I started getting worried about weight gain. I didn’t like the way I looked, I hated seeing photos highlighting my tubbiness, but I loved food, cooking and eating it, especially the latter. I also preferred to take a fatalist line. Both my parents were slim in youth, especially my mother, and then developed a middle-aged spread. It was inevitable, you got older, your metabolism slowed, you slowed, you didn’t do the sporty outdoor things you used to, and you developed a sophisticated interest in and love of food that, in spite of the extra bulk and the gastric ailments, made life so much more je ne sais quoi than in your tenderfoot days. Genetics and the Zeitgeist are against you, so relax and just roll with the fat.
And yet, vanity was prevailing upon me to cut a more dashing figure before it was too late, and I was certainly keen to live longer. My weight had gotten up to 83.5 kgs, and I’m a shorty, at around 167-168cms, so according to that rough guide, the BMI, I was about half a kilo below being officially obese. So I decided to cut down on eating so much. No planned or organised diet, just plain old calorie restriction. I wanted to get down to under 80kgs at least, in the short term, and after that, well, just one day at a time as the cliché has it. if I could get my weight down to the mid-seventies that would be fantastic, but difficult, and unlikely.
Well, fast forward to the present, and my weight fluctuates daily between 68.5 and 69 kgs, and I’ve moved completely out of the overweight category to normal. Digestive and gastric problems almost completely gone, more energy, and above all a level of pride at my self-discipline that’s beyond price. It was a long slow road, but a fascinating one, and it was nothing but calorie restriction, and a daily handful of exercises out of the CSIRO heart book that did it. You watch, I’ll be struck down by a heart attack or bowel cancer tomorrow.
Anyhow, considering my pretty well seamless experience of gradual weight loss, I’m interested in an article in the most recent Skeptical Inquirer magazine which takes a look at the obesity issue and asks the question – is ‘energy balance’ really the problem, and the solution?
Don’t worry, I’m not talking about new-age energy derived from crystals or pyramids, I’m talking about the balance between calories consumed and calories burned off. Basically, the prevailing wisdom is that we eat too much (especially of the wrong kind of food) and exercise too little, and this imbalance causes obesity. It’s a prevailing wisdom that’s worked for me – though it’s difficult, as I’m now constantly at myself to forgo that piece of food and to get up and move around more. And there will be no end to that vigilance, till the day I die or give up caring.
Even so, I would be very sceptical of a silver bullet approach to this problem, though of course I recognise that calorie restriction just doesn’t seem to work for a lot of people, mainly because they just aren’t able to permanently change their behaviour. And of course many would argue that cutting down their food intake drastically would reduce their quality of life too much. The Skeptic’s Guide folks were saying in their last episode that their late mate Perry would probably prefer to die at twenty, scoffing down a hamburger, than live on 1600 cals a day. That’s a bit extreme, but you get the drift.
I’m not a calorie counter, and I’ve no idea of my basal metabolic rate, but I’d roughly guess that around 1600 cals a day is what I’m down to, and I’d also guess that the reason I’ve been able to change my behaviour is because it wasn’t so ingrained in me in the first place. I was a really skinny kid who was an almost unmanageably finicky eater. I hated almost all vegetables, and many different kinds of meat, and my mother had a terrible time, apparently, trying to find nutritious foods that I would eat. As I got into my teens I was pretty active and sporty and I really didn’t think about food much, though my childhood sensitivities about the stuff gradually faded. What spoiled me – though some would look at it very differently – was a job I took on in my early twenties as a kitchen hand in a prestigious French restaurant. The alimentation there was to die for, and the experience h my attitude to food, and the cooking thereof, for better or worse. Add to that the inevitable slow-down as sporty youth has been left behind, and my working life, such as it’s been, has tended more towards the sedentary.
So it’s a far cry from the battle facing the childhood obese, who’ve laid down heavy neural pathways connecting fatty, sugary foods with well-being and pleasure, or so I imagine. Or had them laid down by their nasty fatty parents. I seem to have recovered psychologically something of the more active spirit of my youth, actually managing to keep, largely, to a regimen of simple exercises – no gym fees – and some not-brisk-enough walking (I really do seem to have laid down an abundance of neural pathways for dawdling), as well as managing to switch off, largely, the lazy snacking-grazing habits of my latter years.
But to return to the article ‘Obesity:what does the science really say?’. There’s some argy-bargy, but it doesn’t really contradict the energy balance approach, as I see it, it just supplements and modifies it with more detailed knowledge about hormones, sweeteners, refined foods and the like.
Okay, the sugar issue has become a major bone of contention. Here’s a quote:
Pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig (2012) agrees that adiposity is a hormonal predicament. In his new book, Fat Chance, the child obesity expert indicts simple, super-sweet sugars as the chief culprits, arguing that sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup corrupt our biochemistry and render us helplessly hungry and lethargic in ways fat and protein do not. In other words, Lustig insists that sugar-induced hormonal imbalances cause self-destructive behaviours, not the other way round.
Australia’s fabulous Cosmos magazine had a headline article, ‘Toxic sugar’, late last year which particularly targeted the previously under-rated fructose as a major public health hazard. Obviously, if Cosmos is featuring this view, it must be right, though the article was nuanced and highlighted the debate as much as any particular position. Anyway, think fructose, think fruit, right? Well, yes and no. Fructose, of course, is found in sweet fruit, but how many kids gorge on sweet fruit these days, when they can drink litres of soft drink instead? High fructose corn syrup (HFCS), used in soft drink and many other products, is the major source of fructose in modern western diets – particularly in the US. It’s this intake that’s led to the huge rise in a particular type of liver disease, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, as well as childhood diabetes. Fructose is ‘sweeter’ than glucose, and is added to many products because it makes them sell.
Fructose differs from glucose in that it doesn’t stimulate a direct insulin response from the liver. Lustig contends that understanding insulin is a major key to understanding obesity and a host of ailments which together constitute ‘metabolic syndrome’. Table sugar is made up of both fructose and glucose, though the fructose can go largely undetected, because it’s only glucose that we measure when we check blood sugar levels.
But really, how complicated and debated all this stuff is. Other researchers point out that, though teenagers might drink copious quantities of HFCS-laced soft drink, most adult intake of fructose is not enough to be problematic. In my own case, I don’t eat as much fruit as I’m supposed to (which is how much?), and I haven’t had a sweet tooth since childhood. In the sugar bowl in my kitchen, the raw sugar has turned hard as a rock for lack of use (I don’t get many visitors), and the same goes for the big jar of sugar in my cupboard. Still, the last time (in fact the only time) I had my general blood chemistry checked out – 18 months ago, when my weight was at its highest – my triglyceride levels, and my LDL cholesterol levels, were slightly raised. I suspect most of my sugars were obtained from starchy foods, particularly bread, which I’ve cut down on quite a bit. Carbohydrates such as bread, potatoes and pasta – all favourite foods of mine, but all of which I’ve cut down on sharply in the last 18 months – are made up of complex glucose-containing molecules, which are broken up by the digestive system to allow glucose to enter the bloodstream.
In any case, it’s easy for me to say how I tackled obesity, or the threat of it. My approach was fairly casual. I ate less, really quite a lot less, but particularly targeted carbohydrates and processed foods. Processed foods are a worry in two ways – they take up far less energy to consume, and they come with added sugar. As one researcher puts it, we just don’t require any extra sugar in our diet, our bodies produce enough of it for all our requirements. I’ve never really measured calories, I’ve just gone on gut feeling, pun intended. I have no way of objectively measuring my health – I don’t have the technology available to me. It’s funny, your body is like a ‘black box’. I’ve no idea right now of my blood sugar levels, my levels of insulin, leptin, cortisol and other vital hormones mentioned in the material I’ve been reading. I don’t know how my electrolytes are faring or whether there’s too much fat accumulating around my organs. All I’m able to measure is my weight. Even my greater feelings of well-being are entirely subjective. I could well be fooling myself. Still, in spite of the debates among dieticians and obesity researchers, the consensus is clear, and it seems they’re arguing more and more about less and less. Avoid fatty foods and sugary foods, perhaps especially the latter, because they play havoc with your hormonal system, creating addictive behaviours and insulin resistance. Generally eat less, and enjoy what you eat more, and keep up with moderate, regular exercise. An active life, both physically and intellectually, will help break the habit of psychological dependence on food. Try to get your ‘rushes’ and to feed your ‘satisfaction centres’ from some other source than food. Not very scientific, I know, but it worked for me – he added with a smug little smirk.