KirstenMortensen.com

This topic is almost too upsetting for me to blog about, but I need to put my opinion out there in the hopes that somehow it might help influence peoples’ thinking on this topic.

As you know if you’ve been anywhere near a mainstream media outlet this week, the American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a recommendation that children as young as two be screened for cholesterol and, even more heinous, children as young as eight should be put on cholesterol-lowering drugs.

We need to wake up. Cholesterol is NOT the problem.

Trying to lower cholesterol via prescription drugs, OTOH, is a HUGE problem.

I’ve blogged before about cholesterol. We’ve managed to collectively demonize the stuff: a textbook example of the phenomenon of “mistaken consensus.”

Here’s the reality of the situation. We NEED cholesterol. Our brains need it, our bodies need it. It’s an essential component of dozens of critical cellular structures, such as the myelin sheaths that surround our nerve cells (can’t lay down new neural pathways in the brain without myelin, folks); it’s a component of the bile salts we use to digest fats; it’s a building block of our sex hormones (yes, that’s estrogen, testosterone, & friends).

So why is cholesterol the bad guy? Because it’s also a well-known component of arterial plaque.

But we’ve made a crucial error. We’ve assumed that since plaque is made of cholesterol, lowering cholesterol levels will help prevent heart disease.

Well, I say “we.” People have been questioning the role of cholesterol for years, now. This is from 1987:

In considering 1,400 patients whose blocked arteries were replaced with veins taken from other parts of their bodies, Dr. [Michael E.] DeBakey found again that cholesterol levels did not predict which of these bypass patients would redevelop blockage and require further surgery. He said patients with ”low” cholesterol levels, below 200 micrograms per milliliter of blood, did not fare better as a group than patients with high levels, about 240.

That’s over 20 years ago!

Since then, the thinking has evolved considerably; research now points more toward inflammation than cholesterol levels as the critical risk factor for heart disease. Google “inflammation heart disease” and you find plenty of stuff to mull, much of it along the lines of this bit from Andrew Weil’s website:

C-reactive protein (CRP) is a substance found in blood that is a marker for inflammation in the body. High levels of this protein are associated with an increased risk of heart disease and low levels with a low risk. The notion that inflammation plays a central role in heart disease is relatively new, although we’ve long known that CRP levels go up to signal any type of inflammation . . .

[T]he link between elevated CRP levels and heart disease has been demonstrated repeatedly, and there is some evidence that CRP may be a more important indicator of heart disease risk than high LDL (”bad”) cholesterol. In an eight-year study involving 27,939 women led by Paul Ridker, MD, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, more than half of the women who eventually developed heart disease had high CRP levels even though their LDL levels were not considered high. Dr. Ridker has estimated that the same may be true for 25 percent of the U.S. population. The study results were published in the November 14, 2002, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. More recently, a Cleveland Clinic study found ultrasound evidence that clogged coronary arteries had not gotten worse among 502 patients who were most successful at lowering their CRP levels. The study was published in the Jan. 6, 2005, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

It gets crazier. Courtesy of this piece published by the Weston Price Foundation: cholesterol seems to protect against infection. Since infection causes inflammation (low grade bacterial infection might be the true heart disease culprit), high cholesterol levels might actually PROTECT against heart disease.

Yes, there is a subset of the population for which high levels of so-called “bad” cholesterol is correlated with increased risk of heart disease. But it’s only a small subset. And it doesn’t include kids!

So why would ANYONE even CONSIDER drugging kids to lower their cholesterol levels?

I’m no conspiracy theorist. But I do think the American Academy of Pediatrics has betrayed its role as an advocate for our children. It’s shown itself to be too cozy to the “drugs are the answer” model of health care–and that’s not a positive thing.

Put on your thinking caps, guys, for crying out loud.

We need to feed our kids better. Childhood obesity IS an issue.

But drugging our kids to artificially lower levels of an essential molecule is NOT going to solve the problem.

What is will do, count on it, is put them at risk for a world of hurt. Starting with the known side effects of these drugs. And ending with who-knows-what other horrors. Messed up brain development? Hormonal imbalances during crucial stages of puberty? We just don’t know.

It makes me sick to my stomach . . .

Jim Nugent, Water Quality Laboratory Manager at our Monroe County Water Authority, graciously answered the questions I emailed about our municipal fluoride policy.

So allow me to share :-)

First, the more factual bits.

The county spends $88,000 on fluoridation annually.

None of the fluoride we use here comes from China. Nugent writes that “We require that all source material used for all of our treatment chemicals originate from the USA or Canada. This requirement was approved by the Board of Directors in wake of 9-11.”

As far as purity, he says that the MCWA specifies, as part of its procurement process, that our fluoride be certified by the National Sanitation Foundation or Underwriter’s Laboratory. So if there’s, ya know, dog hair in our fluoride that’s who to blame.

When we get to the stickier questions — why do we do it, and is anyone rethinking it in light of recent science — Nugent toes the pro-fluoride line (not surprising) and suggests that if I’m looking for an agency to pester, it’s not the MCWA but the NYS Department of Health:

MCWA looks to the NYSDOH, the U.S. EPA, the Centers for Disease Control, and the medical and dental communities for their information and research on medical and dental health. The NYSDOH strongly recommends the use of fluoride as evidenced by their new series of fluoride information bulletins (attached). Fluoride addition is currently part of our NYDOH approved treatment process (since 1966) which can not be modified without NYDOH permission.

Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the USEPA is required to set drinking water standards for the protection of human health. The EPA is required to review and re-evaluate theses standards on a six year cycle or at any time if warranted by new information. The NRC study you reference was part of this ongoing evaluation process. Your interpretation of the results of this study are not consistent with the USEPA’s.

Drinking water utilities are highly regulated entities in the US. These rules and regulations are established by NYDOH and USEPA and it is to them you should address your concerns. The USEPA has been very conservative, i.e., protective of human health, in it approach to fluoridation. It should also be noted that California, one of the most aggressive environmental states, just recently began requiring all water systems to fluoridate.

I appreciate your interest in this matter. I believe the USEPA has looked at fluoridation as hard as any compound it regulates and it, as well as NYDOH, CDC, and the dental community, still support the practice and its safety.

Am I persuaded by this?

No.

As just one point, I don’t agree that the USEPA has been “conservative” in its approach to fluoridation. A truly conservative approach would have been to leave the water alone with respect to fluoridation.

It’s that approach which is warranted, IMO. For starters, the assertion that fluoridated water leads to reduction in tooth decay doesn’t stand to scrutiny. It’s another correlation-but-not-necessarily-causation error that people so commonly make when they try to interpret health trends. See this round-up, for example, which includes bits like this:

“Graphs of tooth decay trends for 12 year olds in 24 countries, prepared using the most recent World Health Organization data, show that the decline in dental decay in recent decades has been comparable in 16 nonfluoridated countries and 8 fluoridated countries which met the inclusion criteria of having (i) a mean annual per capita income in the year 2000 of US$10,000 or more, (ii) a population in the year 2000 of greater than 3 million, and (iii) suitable WHO caries data available. The WHO data do not support fluoridation as being a reason for the decline in dental decay in 12 year olds that has been occurring in recent decades.”
SOURCE: Neurath C. (2005). Tooth decay trends for 12 year olds in nonfluoridated and fluoridated countries. Fluoride 38:324-325.

There’s more at the link.

To summarize my thinking at this point: on the one hand the value of fluoridation for its stated purpose (prevention of tooth decay) is questionable. On the other hand there are valid questions about whether consuming fluoridated water might cause health issues for some people (and maybe all of us, if fluoride concentrates in the pineal gland, like some researchers suspect — suppressed melatonin/serotonin production, anyone?).

I’ve read enough. I’m going to be conservative ;-)

I’m going to buy a distiller.

Dontcha love the language academics use to title their papers?

Saweeeeeeeet.

lol

The stuff inside this particular one is even better, though — as reported by the NY Times:

When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.

It happens just today I was thinking about symmetry and the human body — how there is apparent symmetry externally, but the internal organs are not symmetrical.

Which got me thinking specifically about the heart. Why is the heart on the left? Always on the left? Why aren’t there mirror people with right-sided hearts? Would a human with a heart exactly in the middle be . . . different? How? A different species? And I wonder what would it feel like, emotionally, to have a heart smack dab in the middle?

Don’t ask me why I was thinking all this btw. I have no idea. Now if I were a sci fi writer . . .

Anyway, I’m not, so back to the Times article — this biased whole tail wagging thing is because our brains (”our” meaning a whole lotta higher critters) aren’t symmetrical either. And of course the brain’s asymmetry casts a shadow visible on our external bodies, if you know where to look:

Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.

At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system.

Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for predators with their left eye (right brain/danger).

In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain).

But that’s not all. Get this — one researcher speculates that the asymmetry of the brain evolved because of the assymetry of the internal organs:

The asymmetry [of the brain] may also arise from how major nerves in the body connect up to the brain, said Arthur D. Craig, a neuroanatomist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. Nerves that carry information from the skin, heart, liver, lungs and other internal organs are inherently asymmetrical, he said. Thus information from the body that prompts an animal to slow down, eat, relax and restore itself is biased toward the left brain. Information from the body that tells an animal to run, fight, breathe faster and look out for danger is biased toward the right brain.

My speculation about how a person with a heart in a different spot might feel different doesn’t sound quite so weird now, does it ;-)

(Humor me, please! LOL)

Technorati Tags: dogs, neuroscience

They’ve analyzed protein retrieved from a t-rex fossil and turns out — the dinosaur’s closing living relative is a chicken!

Hooray!

Technorati Tags: Tyrannosaurus rex

I expected something different from Candace Pert’s latest book, Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d. For starters, the title’s a bit of a bait to the text’s switch. You aren’t going to find that promised Everything here. In fact, you aren’t going to find much, if any self helpy advicey stuff.

What you’re going to find, instead, are two other books. The one that takes up the most room is an autobiographical account of Pert’s efforts to deal with personal “issues” she’s realized have sabotaged her efforts to realize her vision of an AIDS cure. Pert and her husband, Michael Ruff, have pioneered research on peptides that block the receptors that permit the AIDS virus to enter cells (Pert’s a recognized experts in peptides and peptide receptors; as a graduate student in the 1970s, she proved the existence of opiate receptors). The original research they did was funded by the National Institute of Health; the two have been fighting for years, now, to wrest control of it from others who, for various reasons, have either quashed it or tried to leverage it for other, less compelling causes. This content is no doubt of interest to Pert’s fans, and will no doubt be a useful model to people struggling through parallel difficulties, but it’s not what I was looking for when I bought the book.

The other book got me excited. Unfortunately, it’s on the thin side: bits scattered here and there, primarily as summaries of presentations Pert has given over the last couple of years during her many public appearances.

The first bit peeks out at us right away, when Pert tells us she believes in something even more radical than “mind over matter. ” She believes that “mind becomes matter” — and that there is “real science” to support that assertion.

By sorting out the autobiographical diary-of-a-seeker stuff, one is able to find hints of that science. A big piece of it is that James Oschman (with whom Pert has collaborated on another book) has proposed “a physical structure in the body composed primarily of collagenous fibers, the kind that make up your connective tissue.” This structure, which Oschman calls “the matrix,” connects and penetrates every cell of the body, “a new understanding that flies in the face of the classical view of cells as empty little bags whose interior isn’t hooked up to existing structures.”

The significance of this structure, Pert writes, is that it’s “actually a semiconductor, a substance capable of supporting fast-paced, electrical activity . . . [I]n many ways, it’s like a giant liquid crystal.”

Apparently peptides — some of which we recognize as neurotransmitters that affect mood, e.g. serotonin — cause our cells to give off electrical signals which are transmitted by/across this structure. In other words, when we resonate with an emotion, we really are resonating. Furthermore, others around us can be affected by this resonance, rather like a tuning fork, rung, can cause another tuning fork to vibrate. You know the old quandary about how could a flock of birds sitting in a tree suddenly take off at once, as if they were one organism? Well, based on Pert seems to be saying, they are one organism: they are matrices within a greater matrix . As are the crowds of people at a concert or sporting event or political rally or church service.

Our body can also store charges — i.e., past emotional charges can be recorded by or imprinted in our bodies, causing us to essentially “lock in” to certain habitual ways of feeling or responding emotionally.

There are some other bits as well about the frequencies of music, color, and brain waves sharing identical wavelengths. Put it together and there’s the suggestion that, for example, our emotional response to music can be attributed the way the tones stimulate our cells’ neurotransmitter receptors. Wild. Wish there was more of that kind of stuff in the book.

Technorati Tags: peptides, neurotransmitters

I hate to be the one who says “I told you so” but when the pointed commentary fits ;-)

The news wires are carrying, today, this story about research showing a correlation between obesity and gut flora.

They aren’t sure what the relationship means, yet. Specifically, nobody knows if, say, innoculating the gut with certain strains of microbe could promote weight loss.

But at least they’re finally acknowledging that gut microbes play a role in human health. Kind of like what the alt health crowd has been saying for, oh, thirty-odd years now?

Technorati Tags: bacteria, gut health

Here’s a tribute (by Lynn Margulis and Emily Case, in Orion) to the little critters.

Some of the language of the piece is a bit much — you just can’t use “xenophobia” to characterize anyone’s attitude toward germs. LOL

But if you cut the authors some slack, the piece makes some good points. We do have to stop categorically demonizing bacteria — and touting sterilization as the magic bullet of disease prevention:

Bacteria also sustain us on a very local, intimate scale. They produce necessary vitamins inside our guts. Babies rely on milk, food, and finger-sucking to populate their intestines with bacteria essential for healthy digestion. And microbial communities thrive in the external orifices (mouth, ears, anus, vagina) of mammals, in ways that enhance metabolism, block opportunistic infection, ensure stable digestive patterns, maintain healthy immune systems, and accelerate healing after injury. When these communities are depleted, as might occur from the use of antibacterial soap, mouthwash, or douching, certain potentially pathogenic fungi—like Candida or vaginal yeast disorders—can begin to grow profusely on our dead and dying cells. Self-centered antiseptic paranoia, not the bacteria, is our enemy here.

Yeah, “self-centered.” LOL

Well. If we eschew blaming laypeople for fearing germs, it’s clear that we consumers are not the real culprit. We do the best we can with what scientists and the media tell us.

Laypeople can’t be expected to challenge something as seemingly self-evident as “E coli-tainted food can kill ya.” Particularly when scary stories about poison spinach and undercooked burgers and raw milk are shoved down our throats with grim regularity.

The real culprit is medical research: researchers who’ve spent the last 100+ years playing the whodunnit game that guys like Pasteur got started — and, as a result, haven’t bothered asking broader questions about microbial ecology.

But one of these days, we’re going to wake up and realize that one of our most powerful tools for fighting disease is to colonize our bodies with certain strains of bacteria (and other organisms too, probably). Like what we whole foodies do with yogurt and kefir only taken to a whole new level.

That will be a healthy development ;-)

Technorati Tags: bacteria, health

She was a brilliant naturalist — one of the first people in the world to recognize that lichens are a symbiotic organism, for instance. As a woman, however, she was excluded from assuming what would have been, today, her place in the scientific community.

Article here in Chet Raymo’s online Science Musings.

Technorati Tags: science, Beatrix Potter

That would be science v. religion >:-)

Courtesy of Curtis Brainard and CJR Daily, we have this nice round-up of the media coverage of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion:

[U]nfavorable reviews of The God Delusion have branded Dawkins’ promotion of science as “fundamentalist” and “evangelical.” It gave pause when proponents of intelligent design began to argue like scientists, and it is equally so when the opposite happens, and scientists begin to argue like preachers.

You don’t say!

lol

The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between the conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable — perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science.

– C.J. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

What evangelical atheists fail to appreciate is that they, too, are in the thrall of myth. More Jung:

The real facts do not change, whatever names we give them. Only we ourselves are affected. If one were to conceive of “God” as “pure Nothingnes,” that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact of a superordinate principle. We are just as much possessed as before; the change of name has removed nothing at all from reality. At most we have taken a false attitude toward reality if the new name implies a denial.

;-)

Technorati Tags: religion, science

The Neanderthals — not Homo Sapiens – may have been the true “apex of the family tree.”

As postulated by Erik Trinkaus, paleontologist and Neanderthal expert at Washington University in St. Louis. He’s just published a paper on the subject. The link above is to an interview with him that’s posted on the website of the Archaeological Institute of America. Here’s an excerpt:

If you look at the literature in human paleontology over the last five years, there are numerous articles that are trying to explain why Neanderthals are different. They’re trying to analyze features of the Neanderthals that appear different or weird, in some cases to understand them biologically, in some cases simply to document that they’re different. There is virtually nothing in that same literature that tries to document why it is that modern humans are different from the previous 2 million years of human evolution. In other words, the question people are asking is not, “Why did modern humans evolve the anatomy we have?” What people are asking is, “Why do we have this weird group of humans who lived in Europe and the Near East that we call Neanderthals?”

If he’s right, modern man is actually an offshoot that managed to prevail — as, meanwhile, the main trunk of our evolutionary lineage failed.

Bizarre. And yet — not.

(Trinkaus has been assembling evidence to support this idea for three decades btw. Phew.)

Technorati Tags: anthropology, Neanderthals