THE OLD ACRYLAMIDE SCARE REVIVED

Smokers, barbecuers and coffee-drinkers watch out! They are after you! Yet another stupid epidemiological study based on self-reports and no way of excluding confounding factors -- such as obesity and poverty. The middle class are healthier and also much less likely to report consumption of unprestigious fast food and that alone could account for the small differences observed. See here for the much stronger evidence that acrylamide is NOT harmful.

I might also remark in passing that the differences found below were in rare cancers, were found in very old ladies and were found only between extremes of supposed acrylamide consumption. The use of extreme quintiles for analysis also tends to suggest that there was NO overall correlation between consumption and cancer. Throwing away three fifths of your data is not a persuasive analysis. Attention-seeking medical researchers often do it, though. Popular summary and journal abstract follow:

Fresh fears have been raised over the safety of cooked foods as a wide-ranging study found for the first time that a common chemical caused by frying, roasting or grilling can double the risk of cancer in women. Five years ago, scientists sparked a worldwide alert when they disclosed that many household foods contain the substance acrylamide, which was thought to be a probable cause of the disease. Now a study involving 120,000 people - half of whom were women - has established a direct link between consumption of the chemical and the incidence of ovarian and womb cancer.

Research has shown that acrylamide is found in cooked foods such as bread, breakfast cereals, coffee and also meat and potatoes which had been fried, baked, roasted, grilled or barbecued. The Dutch study found that women who absorbed more acrylamide were twice as likely to develop ovarian or womb cancer as those who ingested a smaller amount. The higher amount eaten by the women involved was the equivalent to a single packet of crisps, half a pack of biscuits, or a portion of chips a day.

The EU has now advised people to avoid burnt toast or golden brown chips because they contain higher levels of the substance acrylamide. They have also recommended eating home-cooked meals which contain much lower amounts of the chemical than processed products, fast food and restaurant meals.

The Food Standards Agency welcomed the report and called on consumers to heed the EU's advice. However, a spokesman said it was not possible to avoid the chemical entirely. "This new study supports our current advice and policy, which already assumes that acrylamide has the potential to be a human carcinogen," a spokesman said. "Since acrylamide forms naturally in a wide variety of cooked foods, it is not possible to have a healthy balanced diet that avoids it."

The findings from the University of Maastricht, published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, came only a month after the public was warned about the increased risk of cancer from eating bacon and ham. It also came as the Government launches a five-year strategy to combat the disease.

The Dutch report relied on the Netherlands Cohort Study, which involved 120,000 people aged between 55 and 70, about 62,000 of them women. At the start of the study, participants completed a questionnaire that was used to estimate their acrylamide intake. The participants were followed up through the Dutch cancer registries and after 11 years, 327 had developed endometrial (womb) cancer, 300 were diagnosed with ovarian cancer and 1,835 suffered breast cancer. The study found that women who had eaten 40 micrograms of acrylamide a day (found, for example in a 32g pack of crisps) had double the risk of endometrial cancer and ovarian cancer than women in the lowest category. There was no link found to breast cancer.

Janneke Hogervorst, at the Department of Epidemiology at Maastricht University, said that "this is the first observation of an association between dietary acrylamide intake and cancer in humans". But she warned: "It is important that these results are corroborated and confirmed by other studies before far-reaching conclusions can be drawn."

About 6,400 women are diagnosed with womb cancer in Britain each year and 7,000 with ovarian cancer, one of the highest rates in Europe. The FSA said people should try to have less fried and overcooked food in their diet. "People should eat a balanced healthy diet which includes plenty of fruit and vegetables, bread, other cereals and potatoes," a spokesman said. "They should also limit the amount of sugary and fatty foods they eat, including fried food such as chips and crisps."

The EU called on people not to overcook their food. "General advice, resulting from this project, is to avoid overcooking when baking, frying or toasting carbohydrate-rich foods," it recommended. "French fries and roast potatoes should be cooked to a golden yellow rather than golden brown colour and bread should be toasted to the lightest colour acceptable."

Dr Lesley Walker, of Cancer Research UK, tried to calm fears over the link, suggesting that other factors could have a greater impact on the chances of cancer. "Women shouldn't be unduly worried by this news," she said. "It's not easy to separate out one component of the diet from all the others when studying the complex diets of ordinary people. "And as acrylamide levels are highest in carbohydrate containing foods - such as chips and crisps - other factors need to be firmly ruled out, especially being overweight or obese, which we know is strongly linked to womb cancer and probably linked to ovarian cancer."

A Food and Drink Federation spokesman said: "The food manufacturing industry has made huge efforts to reduce the formation of acrylamide in manufactured foods using a variety of techniques. "Considerable progress has already been made in reducing levels - for example potato crisps 30-40 per cent, potato fries 15 per cent, crispbread 75 per cent - but more work is needed on coffee."

When the alarm was raised in 2002, the FSA tested a number of products, including Walkers Crisps, Ryvita crackers, Kellogg's Rice Crispies and Pringles crisps. They found higher levels of the chemical occurring naturally in the food than international safety limits permitted in the packaging of the product. Although people fry less food at home, the popularity of fast food means increasing levels are being consumed. In 2000, charred meat and blackened toast were condemned because other chemicals formed on the burnt food were found to contribute to the risk of cancer.

Source

A Prospective Study of Dietary Acrylamide Intake and the Risk of Endometrial, Ovarian, and Breast Cancer

By Janneke G. Hogervorst et al.

Background: Acrylamide, a probable human carcinogen, was detected in various heat-treated carbohydrate-rich foods in 2002. The few epidemiologic studies done thus far have not shown a relationship with cancer. Our aim was to investigate the association between acrylamide intake and endometrial, ovarian, and breast cancer risk.

Methods: The Netherlands Cohort Study on diet and cancer includes 62,573 women, aged 55-69 years. At baseline (1986), a random subcohort of 2,589 women was selected using a case cohort analysis approach for analysis. The acrylamide intake of subcohort members and cases was assessed with a food frequency questionnaire and was based on chemical analysis of all relevant Dutch foods. Subgroup analyses were done for never-smokers to eliminate the influence of smoking; an important source of acrylamide.

Results: After 11.3 years of follow-up, 327, 300, and 1,835 cases of endometrial, ovarian, and breast cancer, respectively, were documented. Compared with the lowest quintile of acrylamide intake (mean intake, 8.9 mg/day), multivariable-adjusted hazard rate ratios (HR) for endometrial, ovarian, and breast cancer in the highest quintile (mean intake, 40.2 mg/day) were 1.29 [95% confidence interval (95% CI), 0.81-2.07; Ptrend = 0.18], 1.78 (95% CI, 1.10-2.88; Ptrend = 0.02), and 0.93 (95% CI, 0.73-1.19; Ptrend = 0.79), respectively. For never-smokers, the corresponding HRs were 1.99 (95% CI, 1.12-3.52; Ptrend = 0.03), 2.22 (95% CI, 1.20-4.08; Ptrend = 0.01), and 1.10 (95% CI, 0.80-1.52; Ptrend = 0.55).

Conclusions: We observed increased risks of postmenopausal endometrial and ovarian cancer with increasing dietary acrylamide intake, particularly among never-smokers. Risk of breast cancer was not associated with acrylamide intake.

Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2007;16(11):2304-13





Honey is better than children's cough syrups for a silent night

It is true that most cough mixtures are pretty useless most of the time

Natural honey is a more effective remedy for children's coughs than over-the-counter medicines, researchers say. A dose of buckwheat honey before bedtime easily outperformed a cough suppressant in a US study. Honey did a better job of reducing the severity and frequency of night-time coughs. It also improved sleep quality for children and their parents.

Dextromethorphan (DM), the active ingredient in many cough mixtures sold in chemists and supermarkets, had no significant impact on symptoms. Honey has been used in medicine for centuries, not only to treat coughs and bronchitis but also to assist the healing of wounds. For coughs it is often mixed with lemon, ginger or brandy.

Ian Paul, who led the researchers from Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pennsylvania, said: "We hope that medical professionals will consider the positive potential of honey as a treatment, given the lack of proven efficacy, expense, and potential for adverse effects associated with the use of DM." DM can cause severe involuntary muscle contractions and spasms, the researchers said. Cases of teenagers using the drug to get "high" were also common, they said.

Dr Paul's team observed 105 children and teenagers with respiratory tract infections. The study ran over two nights. On the first, none of the participants was given any treatment. On the second, they were divided into groups who received either honey, an artificial honey-flavoured DM medicine or no treatment, about half an hour before bedtime. Parents answered questions about their child's symptoms and sleep quality, as well as their own ability to sleep. They rated honey as significantly better for the relief of symptoms. The findings are reported today in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

*********************

Cancerous night-shifts?

I suppose we should be thankful that the article below admits that the conclusions it offers are speculative

Like UV rays and diesel exhaust fumes, working the graveyard shift will soon be listed as a "probable" cause of cancer. It is a surprising step validating a concept once considered wacky. And it is based on research that finds higher rates of breast and prostate cancer among women and men whose work day starts after dark. Next month, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the cancer arm of the World Health Organization, will add overnight shift work as a probable carcinogen.

The higher cancer rates don't prove working overnight can cause cancer. There may be other factors common among graveyard shift workers that raise their risk for cancer. [Like being poor] However, scientists suspect that overnight work is dangerous because it disrupts the circadian rhythm, the body's biological clock. The hormone melatonin, which can suppress tumor development, is normally produced at night.

If the graveyard shift theory eventually proves correct, millions of people worldwide could be affected. Experts estimate that nearly 20 percent of the working population in developed countries work night shifts.

Among the first to spot the night shift-cancer connection was Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologist and professor at the University of Connecticut Health Center. In 1987, Stevens published a paper suggesting a link between light at night and breast cancer. Back then, he was trying to figure out why breast cancer incidence suddenly shot up starting in the 1930s in industrialized societies, where nighttime work was considered a hallmark of progress. Most scientists were bewildered by his proposal.

But in recent years, several studies have found that women working at night over many years were indeed more prone to breast cancer. Also, animals that have their light-dark schedules switched develop more cancerous tumors and die earlier. Some research also suggests that men working at night may have a higher rate of prostate cancer.

Because these studies mostly focused on nurses and airline crews, bigger studies in different populations are needed to confirm or disprove the findings. There are still plenty of skeptics. And to put the risk in perspective, the "probable carcinogen" tag means that the link between overnight work and cancer is merely plausible. Among the long list of agents that are listed as "known" carcinogens are alcoholic beverages and birth control pills. Such lists say nothing about exposure amount or length of time or how likely they are to cause cancer.

The American Cancer Society Web site notes that carcinogens do not always cause cancer. The cancer society doesn't make its own assessments of possible cancer-causing agents, but relies on analyses by the IARC and a U.S. agency. Still, many doubters of the night shift link may be won over by the IARC's analysis to be published in the December issue of the journal Lancet Oncology. "The indications are positive," said Vincent Cogliano, who heads up the agency's carcinogen classifications unit. "There was enough of a pattern in people who do shift work to recognize that there's an increase in cancer, but we can't rule out the possibility of other factors."

Scientists believe having lower melatonin levels can raise the risk of developing cancer. Light shuts down melatonin production, so people working in artificial light at night may have lower melatonin levels. Melatonin can be taken as a supplement, but experts don't recommend it long-term, since that could ruin the body's ability to produce it naturally.

Sleep deprivation may be another factor in cancer risk. People who work at night are not usually able to completely reverse their day and night cycles. "Night shift people tend to be day shift people who are trying to stay awake at night," said Mark Rea, director of the Light Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, who is not connected with the IARC analysis. Not getting enough sleep makes your immune system vulnerable to attack, and less able to fight off potentially cancerous cells.

Confusing your body's natural rhythm can also lead to a breakdown of other essential tasks. "Timing is very important," Rea said. Certain processes like cell division and DNA repair happen at regular times. Even worse than working an overnight shift is flipping between daytime and overnight work. "The problem is re-setting your body's clock," said Aaron Blair, of the United States' National Cancer Institute, who chaired IARC's recent meeting on shift work. "If you worked at night and stayed on it, that would be less disruptive than constantly changing shifts."

Anyone whose light and dark schedule is often disrupted - including frequent long-haul travelers or insomniacs - could theoretically face the same increased cancer risk, Stevens said. He advises workers to sleep in a darkened room once they get off work. "The balance between light and dark is very important for your body. Just get a dark night's sleep."

Meanwhile, scientists are trying to come up with ways to reduce night workers' cancer risk. And some companies are experimenting with different lighting, seeking a type that doesn't affect melatonin production. So far, the color that seems to have the least effect on melatonin is one that few people would enjoy working under: red.

Source






Anti-salt craze

Strange that they fail to mention that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER!

The nation's top food regulators and the salt industry faced off at an FDA hearing Thursday, although it will be months, perhaps years, before the Food and Drug Administration rules on the salt reduction petition that sparked the hearing. The FDA's conclusion, however, could drastically reduce the amount of salt consumed by Americans every day.

Consumer and health advocacy groups say that after years of neglecting the issue, it's time for government to recognize the harmful effects of salt on blood pressure by imposing limits on salt content in foods sold in stores and to restaurants.

Salt industry representatives question the medical evidence linking salt to heart disease and stroke, and dispute the notion that limits on salt would make Americans healthier.

With each side claiming it has science on its side, and with indisputably high rates of elevated blood pressure in the United States, it is certain that the debate will continue. Even among members of the same family. Jeff Dax said he doesn't often frequent the fast food restaurants that dot Broadway, in Sacramento. He said he typically packs a lunch to eat on breaks from his job as a construction contractor. But that didn't happen Thursday, when he made his way to Taco Bell for a quick taco and quesadilla lunch with his father. Dax, himself an avid cook, said he'd welcome restrictions on salt content in fast foods, citing a family history of clogged arteries and heart disease. "You can always add more (salt)" he said. His father, Tom Dax, disagreed. Like food industry groups, he argues against regulation and for personal responsibility when it comes to diet. "I don't even salt my eggs," he said. "It's better to limit what you eat."

Liz Applegate, a nutrition expert at the University of California, Davis, agrees. While acknowledging studies that show salt contributes to high blood pressure, she said it is foolish to single out the mineral for regulation. "If you cut in half the amount of sodium in, say, a TV dinner, is that going to improve the health of the nation?" she asks. "My answer is no. The bigger issue is too many calories are consumed, and we don't burn the calories. And we don't have enough fruits, vegetables and grains in our diet."

Health advocates pushing for limits on salt content acknowledge that America's health problems are not all rooted in salt consumption. "But this is the single easiest piece of the pie to tackle," said Dr. Stephen Havas, vice president for Science, Quality and Public Health at the American Medical Association, who testified at the FDA hearing Thursday. "You can actually engineer a public health solution. You can systematically reduce the salt in foods and people's palates will adjust very quickly."

Morton Satin, director of technical and regulatory affairs at the Salt Institute, the U.S. salt industry's trade group, disagreed. "They don't understand the role of salt in food," said Satin, citing the highly healthy but salty Mediterranean diet, which features olives, capers and anchovies. Satin, who referred to salt-reduction proponents as "bozos" and "Marx brothers in lab coats," argued that salt limits would make people even less likely to want to eat healthy foods, particularly vegetables like broccoli, which many people agree taste better salted.

Among the proposals before the FDA are a 50 percent reduction in sodium in processed foods, fast food products and restaurant meals over the next decade and improved labeling of food products, including warnings for foods high in sodium. Havas said consumers are still confused about food labeling, and the industry has not done enough voluntarily to make its products healthier. He cited efforts in some European countries, including Great Britain and Finland, to regulate the use of salt in processed foods and to clearly label foods' salt content.

Despite decades of public health messages about the dangers of too much salt, American consumption of salt has actually increased by 55 percent the past 30 years, said Michael F. Jacobson, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which filed the petition with the FDA. Americans now consume about 4,000 milligrams of sodium per day, about twice the amount recommended by the federal government, Jacobson said. There are 2,300 milligrams in a teaspoon of salt. "We are not sending out the full message about cutting back on sodium, and people are eating more and more processed foods," said Havas.

That has resulted in a corresponding increase in hypertension, which affects more than 30 percent of U.S. adults. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is a known risk factor for heart disease and stroke. Excessive salt causes the body to retain fluid, which can overload the body's circulatory system, putting increased pressure on the blood vessel walls, kidneys and heart, Havas said. He cited several studies that link salt consumption with high blood pressure, noting that the World Health Organization has called the evidence conclusive.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

*********************

Scientists believe they can reverse dementia

AUSTRALIAN scientists believe they have cracked the code to preventing dementia by restoring the decaying brain cells of a 65-year-old to the levels of an 18-year-old. The research, presented to pharmaceutical chiefs at a closed event last week, offers new hope for the 200,000 Australians suffering dementia - a group of degenerative brain disorders that includes Alzheimer's disease.

The scientists have developed two ways to stimulate stem cells and regenerate the brain, boosting mental functions such as understanding and memory. Leading stem cell scientist Dr Rod Rietze and his team at the University of Queensland believe increasing the number of stem cells in young and middle-aged brains will help stave off dementia. "The idea is not to transplant anything - but to stimulate what we have got," Dr Rietze said. "The job of the stem cell is to do two things: keep the body functioning and regenerate the tissue. "It makes sense that if you increase the regenerative cells, the brain lasts longer."

Dementia is a major health burden, costing more than $1.4 billion per year - a figure that is expected to blow out due to a rapidly ageing population and longer life expectancies. As people get older, the number of stem cells in the brain decreases rapidly and brain function deteriorates.

Dr Rietze's first approach to turning back the ageing clock involves injecting growth hormones directly into the brains of mice. The second approach involves using physical exercise on a treadmill to trigger stem cells to multiply naturally and improve brain function. "When people do regular exercise, they age better," Dr Rietze said. "There is a correlative relationship."

Dr Rietze and his team believe sustained physical activity may prevent or delay the onset of age-related dementia as much as injecting growth hormones, restoring stem cell levels of a 65-year-old back to that of an 18-year-old. The scientist, who funded his team's radical research with a $1 million Pfizer Fellowship he won in 2004, has submitted his work to international medical journals. "I think really the next step is to design treatment strategies, and the prevention of diseases," he said.

Source





Sticking a needle in alternative medicine

Exotic therapies such as acupuncture might make people feel good. But the role of medicine is to cure patients' illnesses, not make them happy

Alternative medicine is clearly popular (1). In 1990, 60million Americans spent an estimated $13.7 billion on alternative medicine. Americans visited alternative practitioners 425million times in 1990, more often than they visited their primary care physicians. By 1996 Americans were spending $21 billion on alternative medicine. Surveys in the UK reveal annual expenditure of around œ1.5 billion on alternative medicine. And alternative practices now find themselves nestled alongside the mainstream with the best hospitals providing aromatherapy, homeopathy, reflexology, acupuncture and so forth as adjuncts or alternatives to medicines that have been developed in laboratories and tested in clinical trials.

It is important to realise that the current vogue for alternative medicine is not really about alternative medicine at all - it is about us. The whole point of alternative medicine is that it doesn't change; the techniques of alternative medicine were developed several thousand years ago and you are meant to stick with the procedure as a fixed entity. Relative to scientific medicine, which is constantly attacked by scepticism and the proposal of newer and better procedures, alternative medicine is a closed shop. Alternative procedures are what they are and they are not open to development and change: they work because they work, end of story. So if alternative medicine is becoming more popular, then it is clearly not because of any changes in the practice of alternative medicine; it is because of changes in us.

Three things have changed. Firstly, we are physically much healthier. In all corners of the world, except in the former Soviet Union, life expectancy is rising and people are physically healthier for longer stretches of time during their lives. Many factors have contributed to this happy state of affairs, including improved living and working conditions and the rise of scientific medicine that has yielded vaccination programmes, antibiotics, steroids, radiotherapy, anti-viral medicines, and so on (2).

Secondly, and relatedly, having resolved many serious illnesses that blighted lives right up to the middle of the last century, scientific medicine is bumping up against harder problems associated with mechanical wear and tear, ageing and the existential distress of living in `a world without meaning' (3). Although physical health and longevity both trend in a positive direction, there has been a swathe of new problems that are defined by the subjective report of symptoms rather than the objective signs of disease or damage (4). These are disorders such as non-specific low back pain, fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome - illnesses of the `worried well', or, more precisely, the `worried sick', encouraged by a combination of people being healthy enough to be concerned about symptoms that are unlikely to indicate ill-health and being constantly bombarded with messages about ill-health. It is a rare individual who is unaware of the apparent need to reduce caloric intake, watch their units of alcohol, stay out of the sun, eat five fruit and veg a day, exercise, self examine and heed the occasional twinge as a potential harbinger of disease and death (5). When the banalities of everyday life - eating, drinking, catching the occasional ray of sunshine - are perceived as potential threats to continued life, it is little wonder that people are worried and flock to their GP to parade symptoms without illness.

Thirdly, medicine can be horribly impersonal. Doctors are not much interested in your existential concerns. In fact, your doctor is probably pretty keen to look straight through you to find the disease process lurking below. Of course you are more than your illness and a good doctor will at least attempt to engage you as he or she seeks the source of your sickness. In something like Britain's National Health Service system, however, which is driven by political and economic targets, the good doctor has no time to see you and barely has enough time to see your illness. It's much nicer to see an alternative practitioner who takes the time to get to know you, and prepare a treatment that is apparently tailored just for the kind of person you are and the illness or problem you are carrying.

It is tempting to try to deal with the advance of alternative medicine by carrying out randomised controlled trials of the alternative medicine versus a placebo and/or the conventional medical technique. The Guardian`s `Bad Science' columnist, Ben Goldacre, and other contemporary critics of alternative medicines see much benefit in controlled trials to expose the falsehoods of alternative medicine quackery (6). An excellent example of this approach was recently reported by Haake and colleagues (7). They investigated two types of acupuncture versus conventional therapy for chronic low back pain. The first type of acupuncture was based on traditional Chinese meridians; the acupuncture needles were inserted into appropriate Chinese acupuncture spots. The second type of acupuncture followed the same procedure but the needles were inserted into non-traditional or sham spots. Both these types of acupuncture worked better than conventional therapy, but traditional acupuncture spots did not produce better results than the sham spots. Thus it was concluded that acupuncture needles can be useful to alleviate chronic low back pain but it doesn't matter where you stick the needles. This finding echoes those of previous studies, including the finding that a cocktail stick is as beneficial as an acupuncture needle (8).

There is a reason why noxious stimulation of the skin might alleviate chronic low back pain and other types of pain. The experience of pain is never the simple and direct response to a noxious stimulus and is always the consequence of a balance of peripheral activity with activity in the spinal cord and brain that can increase or decrease the experience of pain. Whenever you hurt yourself and rub the injured region you are affecting that balance to damp the flow of noxious information and create pain relief. Noxious stimuli can also affect that balance, and that is, in essence, what the acupuncture needles do. Precisely how one noxious stimulus affects another is very poorly understood. But what we do know suggests that acupuncture shouldn't really work as well as it did in the Haake study. Rubbing an injured area generally provides only mild short-term relief, and rubbing is not likely to replace more conventional analgesics and anaesthetics any time soon.

Why, then, did the acupuncture prove to be more effective than the conventional treatments for chronic low back pain? One possibility is that acupuncture is just better. We might not understand exactly how it works, but perhaps it does work. However, there are some very good reasons to be highly dubious of this interpretation.

Chronic low back pain is a tricky disorder. More than 70 per cent of all cases of low back pain have no identifiable causal pathology. We don't know why the patients have pain and any diagnosis is based on the report of pain rather than on the observation of damage or disease. These types of pain are increasing at a ferocious rate and it seems unlikely that medical factors alone can adequately explain the large uptake in associated work-related incapacity benefits in most countries since the 1970s (4). Expenditure on these benefits has tripled over the past 30 years despite improvements in life expectancy and morbidity rates over the same period. Currently, in the UK, 70 per cent of recipients of incapacity benefit have health-related problems that are not sufficient to fully explain their incapacity in purely medical terms. In sum, chronic low back pain is more of a psychosocial than a medical problem, and so is unlikely to yield to mainstream medical intervention.

Little wonder, then, that the conventional therapy that was compared with acupuncture was a highly eclectic mix of interventions: `The therapies given in the conventional group were physiotherapy, massage, heat therapy, electrotherapy, back school, injections and guidance. In a few patients, therapies included infusions, yoga, hydrojet treatment and swimming.'

My interpretation of this study, therefore, is that at the current moment in time, patients with a non-specific existential disease prefer to spend time with an acupuncturist than with a heat therapist, and it is no surprise that patients report feeling better when they do things that they prefer to do. But it is not the role of medicine to run randomised control trials of stuff that makes people happy in order to prove that stuff that makes people happy tends to make them feel happy. While randomised controlled trials can be justified in some cases, we should not view them as blanket solutions to the problem posed by alternative medicine. Such trials are extremely time-consuming and expensive, and it is often not worth the time and expense to investigate something that is obviously unfounded. Moreover, conducting such a trial can give the impression that a treatment must be worthwhile, given all the expense and time being invested. A negative finding will not necessarily forestall the advocates of alternative medicine and a comprehensively negative finding is always difficult to achieve. Positive effects can be discovered for all sorts of non-specific reasons that can never be fully explained away even if they are almost certainly spurious.

It is also important that medicine does not get too flippant and include alternative treatments because of the argument that they `seem to work' and they `can't do any harm'. First of all, to the extent that these treatments work it is probably via non-specific psychological mechanisms that are parasitical upon prior experiences with medicines that do work. It would be cynical to deliberately mobilise those non-specific responses to provide benefit from a known ineffective treatment. If medicine becomes less than serious about promoting interventions that are known to work via well-understood and well-studied mechanisms, then the authority of medicine is put at risk and the benefits of non-specific psychological responses to medicine may soon be lost.

Secondly, there is the possibility of harm even if the intervention is seemingly innocuous. Most obviously there is the danger of over-zealous advocates of alternative medicine promoting homeopathy to cure cancer, malaria or AIDS and so forth. Less obviously there is the potential undermining of straightforward, bland, but effective medical advice (6). Recently, Hancock and colleagues reported that those presenting with an acute onset of back pain are best treated with advice to stay active and take paracetamol if needed (9). The addition of spinal manipulation or spinal mobilisation and further medication did not provide for a better outcome.

Time is a great healer and most acute symptoms will resolve quite naturally (10). Alternative medicine is partly promoted using the poisonous idea that doctors providing short and simple interventions are fobbing their patients off and not showing the required concern. This encourages patients to focus on their symptoms of ill-health unnecessarily and consume medicines or partake in activities that are unnecessary, unwise or dangerous. This is quite simply an unhealthy state of affairs that actively encourages people to be sicker than they need to be or otherwise would be. In short, medicine needs to recognise that alternative medicine is part of the problem, not part of the cure.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

*********************

NEW COMPOUNDS TO HELP RESIST DIABETES

This is geninely interesting work but hyping it as linked to the alleged beneficial effects of red wine and resveratrol is a stretch. The authors themselves decribe the new molecules as "structurally unrelated to" resveratrol. Whether the results transfer from rats and mice to people remains to be seen, however. Side effects could also be a concern. Popular summary below followed by journal abstract:

Millions of people with adult diabetes could one day be treated with a drug based on the healthy ingredient of red wine which could even help prevent other diseases linked with old age. The new class of drugs, which will be tested on patients next year in Europe or the US mimics the effects of a reduced-calorie diet, which is known to extend the lifespan of a wide range of creatures, from worms to mice and monkeys. They work in the same way as resveratrol, the chemical in wine and grapes thought to deliver some of the proposed health benefits and explain the "French paradox," referring to how the French suffer relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease, despite having a diet relatively rich in saturated fats. [It's no paradox. There is no harm in saturated fats]

The problem with red wine is that earlier animal research suggested that around 1000 glasses would have to be consumed each day to take enough resveratrol to reduce the impact of a high fat diet, increase stamina two fold and significantly extend lifespan. Now new compounds have been developed that are roughly 1,000 times more potent than resveratrol and are also 1,000 times better at staving off the development of type 2 diabetes, report researchers led by Christoph Westphal of the company Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, and David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School, in today's Nature. "The novel drug candidates we have identified can potentially unlock a whole new approach to treating Type 2 Diabetes," stated Dr Jill Milne, lead author of the study.

Type 2 diabetes occurs when the body becomes insensitive to the effects of the hormone insulin and it seems that the new drugs can boost insulin sensitivity substantially. The new drug candidates work by activating a protein called SIRT1, which influences the ageing process and functions to ensure that the body remains receptive to the activity of insulin. The compounds potentially offer an important new avenue for developing treatments to tackle diseases linked to ageing and poor diet.

"The new drug candidates represent a significant milestone because they are the first molecules that have been designed to act on genes that control the ageing process. " For this reason, we feel they have considerable potential to treat diseases of ageing such as Type 2 Diabetes," said Dr Westphal. "The breakthrough in potency we have achieved means that we can obtain the health benefits of resveratrol with a considerably lower dose." "If all goes well, SIRT1 activator drugs could be available on the market as early as 2012 or 2013," he told The Daily Telegraph.

Source

Small molecule activators of SIRT1 as therapeutics for the treatment of type 2 diabetes

By Jill C. Milne et al.

Abstract

Calorie restriction extends lifespan and produces a metabolic profile desirable for treating diseases of ageing such as type 2 diabetes1, 2. SIRT1, an NAD+-dependent deacetylase, is a principal modulator of pathways downstream of calorie restriction that produce beneficial effects on glucose homeostasis and insulin sensitivity3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Resveratrol, a polyphenolic SIRT1 activator, mimics the anti-ageing effects of calorie restriction in lower organisms and in mice fed a high-fat diet ameliorates insulin resistance, increases mitochondrial content, and prolongs survival10, 11, 12, 13, 14.

Here we describe the identification and characterization of small molecule activators of SIRT1 that are structurally unrelated to, and 1,000-fold more potent than, resveratrol. These compounds bind to the SIRT1 enzyme-peptide substrate complex at an allosteric site amino-terminal to the catalytic domain and lower the Michaelis constant for acetylated substrates. In diet-induced obese and genetically obese mice, these compounds improve insulin sensitivity, lower plasma glucose, and increase mitochondrial capacity. In Zucker fa/fa rats, hyperinsulinaemic-euglycaemic clamp studies demonstrate that SIRT1 activators improve whole-body glucose homeostasis and insulin sensitivity in adipose tissue, skeletal muscle and liver. Thus, SIRT1 activation is a promising new therapeutic approach for treating diseases of ageing such as type 2 diabetes.

Nature 450, 712-716 (29 November 2007)





Pomegranates to the rescue?

It's a good thing these results were not statistically significant. Antioxiodants shorten your life so choosing between a longer life and better erections would be a Devil's bargain! Popular summary below followed by journal abstract:

Pomegranate juice can give men a boost in the bedroom according to scientists. A daily glass can act like Viagra, new research shows. Nearly half the men who drank it for a month in the American study said they found it easier to rise to the occasion, reports The Sun.

It is thought the juice is rich in antioxidants which increase blood supply to the penis. Just like drugs for impotence, the antioxidants raise levels of nitric oxide, which relaxes blood-vessel walls.

Fifty-three volunteers aged 21 to 70 with mild to moderate problems drank 8fl oz with their evening meal. Researcher Dr Christopher Forest, of the University of California in Los Angeles, said: "Pomegranate juice has great potential in the management of erectile dysfunction."

Pomegranates have already been hailed a superfruit capable of reducing the risk of heart disease and preventing prostate cancer. The fruit is believed to have more antioxidants than any other juice, tea or red wine.

Source

Efficacy and safety of pomegranate juice on improvement of erectile dysfunction in male patients with mild to moderate erectile dysfunction: a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, crossover study

By C P Forest et al.

Abstract

This randomized-controlled trial examined the efficacy of wonderful variety pomegranate juice versus placebo in improving erections in 53 completed subjects with mild to moderate erectile dysfunction. The crossover design consisted of two 4-week treatment periods separated by a 2-week washout. Efficacy was assessed using International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF) and Global Assessment Questionnaires (GAQ). Of the 42 subjects who demonstrated improvement in GAQ scores after beverage consumption, 25 reported improvement after drinking pomegranate juice. Further, 17 subjects showed preference of one beverage to the other. Subjects were more likely to have improved scores when pomegranate juice was consumed (P=0.058). Although overall statistical significance was not achieved, this pilot study suggests the possibility that larger cohorts and longer treatment periods may achieve statistical significance.

International Journal of Impotence Research (2007) 19, 564-567

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

*********************

ANOTHER TWITCH OF THE ANTIOXIDANT RELIGION

It is doubtful if the study below found anything at all. Old guys who were given both aspirin and beta carotene for many years were found to be a tiny bit more mentally competent than those on placebo. That a tiny effect was found to be statistically significant simply reflects the huge sample size. HOWEVER, was the finding due to the aspirin or the beta carotene? Who knows? The fact that the effect was tiny and the fact that it was not found in people taking the stuff for only about a year suggests an unreliable effect that does not even invite replication. That is probably a very good thing. Antioxidants tend to shorten your lifespan -- so the choice between going ga ga and dying prematurely might not be too pleasant. Popular summary below followed by journal abstract:

BRAIN function declines with age, but it may decline slower in men who take supplements of beta-carotene -- the antioxidant chemical that gives carrots their orange colour. A study in the Archives of Internal Medicine this week found that men who took beta-carotene supplements for more than 15 years had much slower loss of thinking, learning and memory skills than men who did not. In 1982, 4052 healthy men were randomly assigned to take 50mg of beta-carotene or an inactive placebo every other day. They were followed through to 2003, given yearly health surveys and at least one telephone interview between 1998 and 2002 to assess brain function. Men who took beta-carotene had significantly higher scores on several of the cognitive tests compared with men who took the placebo, suggesting that beta-carotene could be used to delay dementia. The authors caution that beta-carotene has also been shown to increase the risk of lung cancer in smokers.

Source

A Randomized Trial of Beta Carotene Supplementation and Cognitive Function in Men

By Francine Grodstein et al.

Background: Oxidative stress contributes to brain aging. Antioxidant treatment, especially over the long term, might confer cognitive benefits.

Methods: We added cognitive testing to the Physicians' Health Study II (PHSII), a randomized trial of beta carotene and other vitamin supplements for chronic disease prevention. The PHSII is a continuation of the Physicians' Health Study (PHS), which had randomized male participants to low-dose aspirin and beta carotene. Participants include those continuing their original beta carotene assignment from the PHS, begun in 1982, and newer recruits randomized as of 1998. The beta carotene arm (50 mg, alternate days) was terminated; follow-up is ongoing for the remaining arms. Near the close of the beta carotene arm, we interviewed 5956 participants older than 65 years to assess general cognition, verbal memory, and category fluency. The primary end point was a global score averaging all tests (using z scores); the secondary end point was a verbal memory score combining results of 4 tests. We compared mean cognition among those assigned to beta carotene vs placebo. We separately examined new recruits and continuing participants.

Results: Among 1904 newly recruited subjects (mean treatment duration, 1 year), cognition was similar across treatment assignments. Among 4052 continuing participants from the PHS (mean treatment duration, 18 years), the mean global score was significantly higher in the beta carotene group than in the placebo group (mean difference in z scores, 0.047 standard units; P = .03). On verbal memory, men receiving long-term beta carotene supplementation also performed significantly better than the placebo group (mean difference in z scores, 0.063; P = .007).

Conclusion: We did not find an impact of short-term beta carotene supplementation on cognitive performance, but long-term supplementation may provide cognitive benefits.

Arch Intern Med. 2007;167(20):2184-2190




TREES ARE GREEN REDISCOVERED YET AGAIN

Would you believe that old people who can't see very well any more get depressed by that? Apparently we needed to be told:

IMPROVING the vision of nursing home residents leads to a better quality of life and fewer cases of depression, finds a new study in the Archives of Ophthalmology. The findings suggest that people in nursing homes can benefit greatly from access to basic eye care services, despite any other disability they may have. Researchers surveyed 142 people with vision problems living in nursing homes in the southern US state of Alabama. Seventy-eight of them received corrective eye glasses within a week and were surveyed again after two months. They were compared to a control group of 64 residents who only received their glasses after the follow-up survey. After two months of corrected vision, the immediate-correction group reported dramatic improvement in quality of life and less depression than the delayed-correction group. They had less difficulty performing daily activities, such as reading and watching TV, than the delayed-correction group, and were better able to join in group activities.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

*********************

IQ: DESPERATION TO BELIEVE MYTHS LEADS TO FALLACIOUS REASONING YET AGAIN

What nonsense below! Are these guys seriously arguing that because genes with high relevance to IQ have not yet been found then there are none? I hate to repeat an old saw but the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Genes relevant to IQ are being discovered all the time. One with a big link to IQ could be just around the corner. Though it is most probable that high IQ is the result of an accumulation of many "good" genes -- which is why high IQ people tend to be healthier and live longer etc.

A team of scientists led by Professor Robert Plomin, of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, identified only six genes linked with intelligence to any degree of significance, but even those accounted for just 1 per cent of the differences in IQ between individuals. Experts said upbringing, education and a healthy diet in early life had important roles to play in helping to nurture intelligence. The research also means testing the potential intelligence of new-born babies - or improving it with genetic engineering - could be impossible.

The researchers said a study of the human genome revealed hundreds of genes which contribute to IQ, but their individual effects are barely detectable. Previous studies on twins and adopted children have established that about half of the variation in intelligence is down to environment, but almost all of the genetic component has yet to be uncovered.

Prof Plomin said: "If the biggest [genes] only account for 1 per cent of the variance [in intelligence], there's a long way to go. The most striking result is there are no large effects." However, this does not mean intelligence is not inherited. Many experts believe IQ is due to the cumulative effect of a combination of genes.

The study, published in the journal Genes, Brains and Behaviour, involved obtaining intelligence scores for 7,000 seven-year-olds and DNA samples. Dr Robin Campbell, an expert in intelligence and child development at Stirling University, said: " [This research] leaves it open that nurture, education and good early nutrition have an important role." [Of course they do. Nobody has ever said otherwise. But genetic inheritance is the major determinant]

Source




Success Depends on Others Failing

There may be something in the theories below but, with a only 19 units of analysis, it seems most unlikely that the findings were statistically significant. Nor can we rule out cultural and sub-cultural influences. The generalizability of these contrived experiments is also unknown but probably slight -- as I showed long ago in another field

Reward mechanisms in the brain depend on how well you think other people are doing, a new neurological study suggests. The findings, published in the Nov. 23 issue of the journal Science are the first to lend physiological proof to a longstanding theory among contemporary economists: that people are affected not only by their own achievements and income, but also by how they stack up against their neighbors.

The study, by cognition experts and economists at the University of Bonn in Germany, looks at the brain regions that process reward. Nineteen pairs of subjects performed a series of tasks, estimating the number of dots on a screen, while their brains were scanned. Each time a subject answered correctly, he or she won a cash prize but the prizes were not always the same. Players could see whether their opponents had answered correctly, and how the prize money was distributed.

The researchers were especially interested in the set of outcomes where both players answered correctly. For any given prize value, the brain's reward response was bigger if the other player earned less. Players on average were more pleased with a 60 euro prize when the other player got just 30 euros, for example, than they were if both players earned 60 euros, or if the other player got more.

"In a sense it goes back to Aristotle," says the paper's senior author, Armin Falk, an economist. "The fact that we are social beings is a well-known fact." But the idea that rewards are context-dependent challenges a key assumption behind most traditional of economic theories: the premise that humans are essentially self-interested, that they care about their own work, income, achievements, and purchases, and that whatever other people do is, if not irrelevant, at least not going to have a consistent or predictable effect on decision-making.

Instead, the brain scans from this study support a mountain of survey data collected by modern economists and psychologists that suggests people care very much about keeping up with the Joneses. In the past, researchers have often struggled to work out how much they could trust that data, not sure whether survey-takers might be changing their response consciously or unconsciously based on what they thought was socially acceptable. The Science findings give further empirical evidence that people compare their gains to others'. "If you look at the brain reaction, it's a relatively immediate physiological reaction," says Falk. "It shows on a deeper level, in the brain, these things really matter."

The practical implications? Many scholars believe that social comparison helps to explain why, even as much of the world gets ever richer, people today don't report being happier than people did 50 years ago. We might not be happy now if we had to give up the amenities of the last half-century computers, air conditioners, a bedroom for every child, and more - but back when no one else had them either, life was okay.

There's also a lesson here for company managers, says Falk. A wage scale should reflect job and performance differences fairly, or else firms risk alienating their staff. "It's extremely important for companies to understand it's not just a matter of justice, but it's also a matter of efficiency," he says. It turns out the negative response to earning less is usually stronger than the positive response to earning more or as Falk says, "The pain of having less is much stronger than the joy of having more." Workers who discover they're earning more for the same work may be happy, but those who earn less can quickly feel slighted, killing motivation and often the quality of their output. It doesn't take a brain specialist to understand how that affects a business.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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CONFUSED RESEARCH ON DISRUPTIVE CHILDREN

IQ ignored again! Has nobody ever told these idiots that high IQ children can be disruptive out of boredom? Failing to control for IQ in this field is brain-dead. Breaking out the data in terms of IQ might have told us something but this is just one big conflation. Disruptive kids kept up ON AVERAGE. Big deal! The average would have been made up of smarties and dummies. So what does that tell us? Nil. And the ones who did badly in later life would mostly have been the dummies

New research suggests that children entering school with behavior problems, as a rule, can keep pace with classroom learning, but persistent behavior problems can be a strong indicator of how well these students adapt to the work world.

Two studies entirely funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Developmental and Learning Sciences program uncovered these results. Researchers working through the Center for the Analyses of Pathways from Childhood to Adulthood (CAPCA) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., conducted both studies.

The findings may help parents, teachers and social and behavioral scientists improve educational and occupational outcomes for disruptive students. "Every student deserves a good education and an opportunity to have a fulfilling work life," said NSF Developmental and Learning Sciences Program Director Amy Sussman. "These findings can help us understand how to make that goal a reality for even the most difficult-to-reach students."

One study examined data from six large-scale studies of almost 36,000 preschoolers in which the same subjects were observed repeatedly over time. The research included two national studies of U.S. children, two multi-site studies of U.S. children, one study of children from Great Britain and one study of children from Canada.

Using various statistical methods to synthesize research results, Greg Duncan, human development and social policy professor at Northwestern University, along with the study's 11 co-authors, found that, surprisingly, difficulty getting along with classmates, aggressive or disruptive behaviors, and sad or withdrawn behaviors in kindergarten did not detract from academic achievement in childhood and early adolescence.

The study's researchers examined several indicators, including picking fights, interrupting the teacher and defying instructions. They found that kindergartners who did these things performed surprisingly well in reading and math when they reached the fifth grade, keeping pace with well-behaved children of the same abilities.

Although Duncan's study found no predictive power in early behavior problems for later learning, another CAPCA study, which examined older children, found such a connection. According to CAPCA investigator Rowell Huesmann, persistent behavior problems in eight-year-olds are a powerful predictor of educational attainment and of how well people will do in middle age.

If behavior problems of the kind seen in younger children continue until age eight, they can create other challenges, said Huesmann. He noted that while a small group of children fall into this category, their behavior has the potential to lead them to lower occupational and academic achievement than that of their better behaved counterparts.

Huesmann based his conclusion on a prior research study and a recent analysis by CAPCA researchers Eric Dubow, Paul Boxer, Lea Pulkkinen and Katja Kokko. That team studied two longitudinal data sets from the United States and Finland. Analysis of data from 856 U.S. children and 369 Finnish children showed that children who engaged in more frequent aggressive behaviors as eight-year-olds had significantly lower educational success by their 30s and significantly lower status occupations by their mid-40s. The results were published in Developmental Psychology. "It makes perfectly good sense that persistent behavior problems would have a substantial impact on later success," said Sussman. "When interviewing for jobs and progressing through one's career trajectory, personality and other characteristics that are not measured by tests certainly come into play."

There's a good chance that personality traits also come into play in the classroom. Huesmann and his colleagues hypothesize that children with persistent behavior problems lasting into the third grade are those who cannot be easily socialized to behave well and who therefore are more likely to experience a "hostile learning environment."

They speculate that teachers and peers likely "punish" these children, reducing or eliminating positive support for learning. But researchers note that if a child's aggression is short-lived, it is unlikely to have the same long-term consequences. "Socialization of disruptive preschoolers by teachers and peers may ensure that a child's behavioral problems do not affect his or her educational achievement," Huesmann said. "Attending class, spending time with classmates, observing the rewards of proper behavior, and being told, 'No,' to correct disruptive behavior can benefit unruly children."

Researchers also noted that popularity and positive social behavior in childhood and adolescence predicted higher levels of educational attainment in early adulthood. They said it is possible that children with stable positive social skills experience a supportive and conducive learning environment.

Duncan's study of kindergartners did not address what types of preschool curricula might be most effective in reducing aggression or promoting school readiness. But researchers pointed out that play-based activities, as opposed to "drill- and practice-based" activities, foster academic and attention skills in ways that are engaging and fun.

Source





Obesity, BMI and political correctness

It has been reported by the Trust for America's Health that West Virginia has the third highest level of adult obesity in the nation at 27 percent and that 65 percent of Americans are overweight. This report ended with a recommendation that more money should be spent for those who do research for nutritional health and for green projects. These claims were made using the body mass index to calculate obesity. We will see that the BMI as used today has little to do with medical science and much to do with political correctness.

The BMI was developed in 1850 by Adolphe Quetelet - a mathematician and sociologist. The BMI is a number derived by taking the weight of a person in pounds and dividing it by the square of their height in inches (weight divided by height times height). This number is then multiplied by 703. This gives the BMI value. A value lower than 18.5 is considered by some to mean that a person is underweight. Normal weight is a value between 18.5 and 25, overweight if more than 25 and obesity if more than 30. Yet, who decides that these values determine if one is underweight, overweight or obese?

The first thing that many of you have already noticed is that the BMI does not take into account sex, body frame, actual fat, muscle mass, ethnic norms or health. What is considered normal is derived by looking at the average weight and height of sedentary to average city dwellers. The problem with this approach is that this makes the socialist assumption that we are sexless, have the same body frame, same ethnicity, same muscle mass and are all sedentary. This is all done without actually measuring fat.

Men, athletes, American rural populations, blacks and those who are active all tend to have higher muscle mass and bone density than the theoretical sexless white collar urbanites have. Thus, all these groups will tend to have an overestimated amount of obesity.

The average BMI the United States used to define being overweight was more than 27.8 - significantly higher than today's 25. However, under pressure from the World Health Organization - which defined the number 25 as being the upper-limit for normal weight - it was based on their evaluation of world populations including Africa, India and other Third-World areas where there is endemic malnutrition if not outright starvation. Based on this evaluation, our government changed what it called overweight to mean a BMI value of 25. Thus, with the wave of the wand 30 million Americans were made overweight in one day.

As Americans we tend to have increased in size because of our majority European heritage, promotion of school athletics and improved health and nutrition. Is it then fair to say that we are fat and unhealthy because we are larger than our smaller counterparts' worlds without taking into consideration heritage, lifestyle, muscle mass and actual fat?

Indeed, a recent study published by Journal of the American Medical Association, using the current defined limits of what is considered normal by the BMI, actually found that those who were overweight actually had less cancer, less infections, less respiratory disease, less mental illness and arguably less neurological disease and cancer than those who were so-called of normal weight or underweight, according to today's BMI values.

The BMI tends to overestimate being overweight and obese in Americans, athletes, racial minorities, American rural populations, the working class and others. Unfortunately, it seems that the current politically correct BMI values may end up killing thousands of Americans.

Source

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Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi-tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

*********************