Here’s a review of a new book, We Want Real Food, by Graham Harvey, which examines the effect of the depletion of soil nutrients on the nutritional quality of our food.
To some extent, we’re able to compensate by taking vitamin supplements, but as I suggested in this post, that’s not an ideal answer, either. In the long run, we need to convert mainstream agriculture to more organic-style practices. No question about it.
In this case, it was a Golden Retriever’s nose. Her name is Wrigley, and she knew something wasn’t quite right with her human companion, Steve Werner.
Steve’s doctor hadn’t been able to figure out why he’d been experiencing some troubling symptoms like ringing in his ear and a feeling of unease.
Then in July, Wrigley started to behave strangely.
Every day when Werner would curl up next to his beloved canine at his Brentwood home, she would turn, focus on his right ear and sniff doggedly.
“I thought it was just a friendly sniff,” Werner said. “But after four or five days, I realized she seemed to be focusing on something. At some point, I noticed she was always sniffing at the opening of my right ear. She would set herself up and intently smell my ear.”
One day, Werner was watching TV when a feature about cancer-sniffing dogs grabbed his attention. What he heard propelled him back to his doctor’s office.
A subsequent MRI revealed a non-malignant tumor that has since been surgically removed.
You may have heard similar accounts, or that some people are training dogs to screen people for cancers. The thinking is that cancerous cells emit chemicals that are not present in healthy cells.
I had to laugh at one part of the article, though. It describes a study conducted by the Pine Street Foundation in California. For the study,
[R]esearchers collected breath samples in plastic tubes from 83 healthy volunteers, 55 lung cancer patients and 31 breast cancer patients.
The tubes were numbered and placed in plastic boxes and presented to the dogs, five at a time. If the dog detected cancer, it was trained to sit or lie down. Researchers determined that the dogs were accurate 99 percent of the time in detecting lung cancer and 88 percent of the time in detecting breast cancer.
But then the article goes on to say “Not everyone is wagging their tails about the dog studies.”
The results of the lung and breast cancer study were too good to be true, said Donald Berry, chairman of the department of applied biostatistics and applied mathematics at the University of Texas-M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
“It’s essentially impossible that anything could be that good,” he said.
lol
I dunno, Don. I’ve definitely encountered some things that are that good!!!
Tara Parker-Pope, a personal health columnist and reporter at the Wall Street Journal, snagged the front page of the March 20 Journal Report with an article titled “The Case Against Vitamins” (subscription required).
Parker-Pope is The Alt Health Voice of the WSJ. Irony intended. The WSJ is pretty pro-pharma — after all, they’re pro-business and pharmaceuticals make people a ton of money — so of course they aren’t going to bring a rabid alt advocate on board for anything like a regular gig.
Not that she’s overtly hostile. She’s somebody’s idea of the new mainstream. If you have a general physician who nods kindly when you discuss nutritional supplements, even though he/she would never actually suggest you take them, then that’s about the tenor of a Parker-Pope article. She’s grounding, because she reminds you that in many cases the science for alt stuff is on the thin side. But be sure to bring the umbrella if she’s invited to the picnic, if you catch my drift.
Anyway, this case against vitamins thing — first off, the headline was a bit of overhype. Reactionary, really. I mean, if you’re my age or older, you can remember a time when taking vitamins was something that normal people just didn’t do. Now it’s something that everyone does. We’re popping supplements like candy. So naturally, there are going to be some vitamin-bites-man stories, of which the March 20 piece is one.
I won’t list the studies rounded up in the article; if you follow this topic at all, you’ve heard about most of them, anyway. And really, the lesson is quite simple: the human body is mind-bogglingly complex, and our understanding of what’s going on at the biomolecular level is still embarrassingly crude. So no matter if you’re doing mainstream medicine or alt health, when you introduce a particular molecule at high concentrations, the best you can do as far as predicting what happens next is an educated guess.
In mainstream medicine, we call our bad guesses “side effects.” In alt health, we call it quackery.
But here’s what’s heartening: the letters to the editor that the paper published last Friday, in response to Parker-Pope’s article. Here’s one of them:
It is clear that eating a balanced diet rich in whole foods is the best way to obtain vitamins, minerals and other essential nutrients the body needs. Healthful diets appear to protect against the development of chronic diseases like heart disease and cancer. Yet when single isolated nutrients found in such diets are studied in reductionist clinical models, limited or negative effects are often seen, supporting the idea that taken out of their whole food context, dietary constituents don’t behave as predicted. Isolated nutrients don’t exist in a vacuum in human biology, and thus they can’t be meaningfully studied in this way. In whole foods, vitamins and minerals exist in a complex matrix along with many other supporting nutrients and potential health-promoting compounds. Metabolism has adapted to the presence of many interacting factors in the diet, a complexity that isn’t always reducible to pharmaceutical clinical methods of study.
In today’s world we have refined much of the phytonutrient diversity out of foods. As a result, we try to supplement with vitamins and minerals perceived to be missing, but with a poor understanding of their effects. The role of diet and dietary supplements in health is much more than the sum of the parts. That is to say, merely combining the results of clinical studies of single isolated nutrients will almost always present a flawed picture of the complex, multi-factorial role of diet in health, because it ignores the complexity of the synergistic whole food nutrient matrix that itself has multiple effects on health.
The role of nutrition research in the future will be to understand how food constituents interact biologically within the context of total dietary intake and human genomics. While the pharmaceutical clinical model will have a role in this pursuit, we are in need of scientifically sound innovative study designs to address the complex food/health interface.
David Barnes, Ph.D.
Director of Research
Standard Process
Palmyra, Wis.
So okay. Standard Process is a supplement manufacturer. But compare his tone to that of this letter from a “pharmaceutical consultant:”
Your analytical report is to be applauded. Vitamins fall into the category of “nutritional supplements,” for which unbelievable claims are often made regarding their salutary effects. When the makers of such products use the term “clinically tested,” or an equivalent statement, they should be required to state information about the studies, such as the number of participants, or whether they randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled investigations with statistical analyses. In addition to the reliability of the clinical studies that are performed, quality control on the actual material in the bottle should, in my view, be equivalent to that for over-the-counter drugs.
Charles G. Smith, Ph.D.
Pharmaceutical Consultant
Yeah, I bet that’s your view, dude.
Note how vitamin guy’s letter is self-reflective, unlike Mr. Pharma Consultant, who wants to rah rah rah bad vitamin stories while people are dropping dead, daily, from prescription drugs. An estimated 9 million Americans abuse prescription drugs. Prescription drugs kill about 125,ooo of us annually.
So don’t sneer at my supplements, pharma-boy, until you show the grace to admit to the demons in your own closet.
We’ll get there — we’ll get to the place where we really do understand how the body works, and how to use nutrition in more sophisticated ways to heal disease and promote health. We’ll get there. But we have a ways to go, yet.
When there’s no license that says so. Or something.
A Village Voice article covers a campaign underway in New York State to restrict the title “Doctor of Naturopathy” to practitioners who hold four-year degrees “from an accredited naturopathic college.”
Among the issues:
* Would licensing make it easier, or harder, for people to make alternative healthcare decisions?
* Is this a power grab by one alt health faction or Altruism Embodied?
* Will licensing help the state find and bring to justice any malevolent alt health practitioners who might land on our fair shores?
* Will licensing pave the way for insurance reimbursements of alt health therapies?
Rochester’s Dale Volker is one of the state senators backing the bill.
Like a lotta gals, my bouts of migraine seem to be hitched to my monthly cycle. Although, with me, perversely, they’re only loosely hitched: my migraine cycle drifts. My worst days, right now, hit about a week later than they did a couple of years ago.
(It would help if I kept written notes, but I don’t. Maybe I’ll start. But c’mon, what I am, my migraines’ secretary? Sheesh.)
Even so, I can predict, with a fair degree of certainty, that I’m within 72 hours of migraine day right now. (It helps that we’ve just come off a 28-day February.)
Which makes me an official Walkin’, Talkin’ Experiment. There have been a couple of studies, small ones, that suggest CoQ 10 can help reduce the frequency of migraine. Here’s a write-up of the second study, which was a double-blind.
I started taking it a month ago. On Tuesday I felt a touch of gut malaise/nausea, touch of pain around my right eye socket from time to time. But both were so faint I probably wouldn’t have noticed, if I weren’t on High Alert . . .
I haven’t uncrossed my fingers quite yet. But I may have dodged the thing this month.
I was amusing myself last night by trying to think if there are any foods that we haven’t been warned not to eat.
You can take all meat, dairy, and grain-based foods off the table (ha ha ha) right away. Poison, all of them.
Legumes — also high carb. Nuts: oooh, all that fat! Back away from the nut, slowly, slowly!!!
Fruit. I once read an article where some researcher said that rats fed too much fruit had watery livers. Something about all that pectin. No, I have no idea what “watery liver” means, don’t ask, I may not even remember the term correctly. But that’s not important. Obviously we should all avoid fruit if we want to live.
So that leaves vegetables. Macrobiotics say for god’s sake don’t even touch members of the nightshade family, so toss out your peppers & tomatoes. Cabbage family stuff can be hard to digest: no brocolli, cauliflower or kale. Forget spinach or Swiss chard: high in oxalic acid. Lettuce: so little food value, what are you thinking? Carrots are pretty high carb, I dunno! Sweet peas are high-carb, too, as is winter squash. Snap peas may be okay.
And green beans.
So that’s what we have left, I think? Snap peas and green beans. Zucchini squash, I guess. Unsalted. And water, assuming it’s filtered.
Bon appetit!
An article in the San Francisco Chronicle by David Lazarus reports that, according to the National Institutes of Health, more than 70 million Americans are affected by “sleep troubles.”
Variety of causes, blah blah blah, use of sleeping pills doubling — well, I could have predicted that.
Here’s my curmudgeonly opinion. Either sleep is a priority, or it isn’t. And obviously it’s not much of a priority for contemporary Americans. (I don’t mean parents with kids under three. You’re hereby exempt from my scolding. Please stop reading this now and go grab a nap.) So of course people have problems with it.
IMO, people tend to think of sleep as a negative space — as an emptiness between what we “really” do and who we really are. Dreams are dismissed as “unreal” or inconsequential. I.e. a waste of time.
Fine. But if that’s as important as it is, no wonder we find it increasingly elusive . . .
There’s been a rash of studies lately that purport to poke holes in popular notions about using supplements to treat various health conditions.
Here’s the latest: an AP report, headlined “Supplements do little for arthritis, study finds” in the Globe & Mail, which says that glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate don’t seem to have much effect on arthritis symptoms.
The article reports the findings of a study by the National Institutes of Health that was published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine. But when you dig into it a bit, some interesting things come to light. One is that well over half of the subjects did get better–including those who were given a placebo:
Sixty per cent who took the placebos had reduced pain compared with 64 per cent who took glucosamine, 65 per cent who took chondroitin and 67 per cent who took the combo pills.
And get this — of the people who took the prescription drug Celebrex? 70 percent reported less pain. Note that the article sums up the spread between the placebo and supplement results as “These differences were so small that they could have occurred by chance alone.” Presumably we could say the same thing about Celebrex vs. glucosamine and chondroitin, then, right?
(No word on whether the subjects taking glucosamine and chondroitin encountered any Celebrex-style side effects.)
The subtext of the argument that traditional medicine likes to mount against alternatives is that alternatives are witchdoctory. Closer to magic than science. But you know what? Traditional medicine is completely dependent on faith, excuse me, “magic,” as well. Publish a few studies that say Celebrex doesn’t work, and that 70 percent figure would start dipping closer to 60 percent.
Me? I just keep my eye out for that perfect placebo. That would be: something that goes well with a nice red wine.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about research that suggests the brains of some Buddhist monks generate more gamma waves than the brains of ordinary folks.
Science and Consciousness Review now has posted an interview with Dr. Sara Lazar. She and other researchers at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital have been comparing brain scans of meditators and non-meditators. The scans suggest
that longterm meditation may increase the thickness of the gray outer layer of cortex, where cortical cell bodies are located . . . An increase in the gray matter thickness could mean an increase in the number of neurons, but also, as the author points out, an increase in dendrites, glial cells or in the cerebral vasculature. Indeed, the finding may reflect a combination of these factors, all of which may contribute to a high-functioning cortex.
The article touches on mainstream implications of the research — might meditating help us stay sharper as we age, etc. But what intrigues me most is a theoretical question that I’ve not seen posed, as yet: might some sort of meditative practice enhance our ability to access different “states of consciousness” more readily? Mystics, like the Christian mystic/metaphysician Neville Goddard, seem to have an inherent ability to switch their attention to non-physical phenomena. Is this a skill that can be learned? And if so, what are the implications for Western spirituality?
Okay, now this just has to be useful. The Social Issues Research Centre has published a timeline of dietary advice.
Where else can you read that in 1861, the cookbook Christianity in the Kitchen warned that pie crust made with butter or lard was both indigestible and un-Christian?
Or that it was once considered wise to fear fruit?
(“What’s that? OMG an apricot! And I think it’s begun to roll this way. Run! Run!”)
(Dontcha just miss the 19th Century?)
