Diet advice [yawn]

I pay no attention to diet advice anymore. I find it tiresome and snooze-inducing. I also dislike the superior attitudes of some of these advice-givers, especially Jane Brody in The New York Times. Besides, the advice often turns out to be wrong. Remember the government’s old food pyramid? The base consisted entirely of carbohydrates: “Bread, Cereal, Rice, & Pasta Group: 6-11 Servings.” That advice has been tossed out.

Like much else, I suspect that a person’s dietary needs may be unique to that person. My favorite example of this is eighty-five-year-old Warren Buffet, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and world’s most successful investor. He drinks at least five 12-ounce servings of Coke every day: “I have three Cokes during the day and two at night.” He also loves to snack on canned potato sticks. When interviewed about his breakfast, he said, “This morning, I had a bowl of chocolate chip ice cream.” He favors hamburgers, steaks, hash browns, and milkshakes. And he hates vegetables: "Broccoli, asparagus, and Brussels sprouts look to me like Chinese food crawling around on a plate. Cauliflower almost makes me sick. I eat carrots reluctantly.” He says that if a three-year-old won’t eat it, he won’t eat it. If you saw him interviewed on television, you’d see a bright, vibrant, happy, guy.

I read a book called What Makes Olga Run. It explores the wild athletic success of Olga Kotelko, who won over 750 gold medals and held over 30 world records in track and field events at the World Masters Athletic games. Note that her victories were for the 90-95 age category. (She started training at age 77.) She participated in a wide variety of events, ranging from sprints to hammer throw to triple jump. While she did eat a fairly balanced diet, the author tells us she ate “immoderate amounts of baked tapioca pudding. I once saw her glop onto her breakfast plate some mysterious ‘sausage’ gravy that looked practically radioactive.” Olga’s friend Ruth Frith, a shot put specialist who competes in the 100-plus category, eats no vegetables. She hates them. Inuits never ate vegetables either, and they got along just fine.

I realize I'm being a bit contrarian here. But I think that being overly fussy about what you eat can diminish the quality of your life. A while ago, at an event that included a buffet lunch, I saw a fashionably thin woman put a small piece of skinless chicken breast and two lettuce leaves on her plate. In my book, that's no way to live. Ice cream for breakfast anyone?

Next week: Saturated fat: nothing to worry about

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Medical reversals: Oops! My bad!

Medical reversals refer to widely-used treatments that were later found to be harmful or useless. A new book, called Ending Medical Reversal, written by two doctors and published by Johns Hopkins University Press, aims to publicize and correct this problem. The problem, they say, is that treatments become accepted before robust data has proven their worth. At the moment, the authors say, we have a “near epidemic of medical reversals.”

A well-known example of a medical reversal is hormone replacement therapy for women. An initial study, involving 127,000 nurses between the ages of 30-55, compared women who took estrogen with those who did not. The results were stunning: those who used estrogen had 40 percent fewer heart attacks than women who did not. Based on this information, doctors wrote millions of prescriptions. Later, a randomized controlled study of 16,000 women between the ages of 50 and 79, came to the opposite conclusion. In this case, the women were randomly assigned to two groups, one of which was given hormone replacement therapy and the other a placebo. The study was halted three years early because the women receiving hormone replacement therapy were developing breast cancer, heart disease, stroke, and pulmonary embolism at a higher rate than those receiving a placebo.

Why the different results between the first and second studies? The first study merely kept track of the health outcome between a group of women who were already taking estrogen and a group who was not. It was not a randomized controlled trial. It turned out that those who were taking estrogen were healthier and wealthier to begin with (and did not smoke)—factors that skewed the results.

Of course, medicines, procedures, and devices are tested to some degree, but it is not uncommon for doctors to jump the gun, acting on hypotheses, case studies, observational studies, and lab results rather than on experimental results. What’s more, scientific papers are rife with faulty data, and many studies are deliberately designed by commercial interests to be deceptive. (A blog called “Retraction Watch” tries to keep track of all the scientific papers that have been retracted. In their first year, they found about 200 papers that were retracted because of errors.)

To make matters worse, studies have shown that it typically takes ten years for the medical community to abandon a practice that has been found to be useless or harmful. Pity the poor folks who gave up eating eggs for fear of raising their cholesterol (eggs do not raise cholesterol).

The book includes an appendix listing studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine between 2001 and 2010 that overturned a practice already in use—in other words, a reversal. There were 138 of these reversals in just this one journal!

Next week: Diet advice [yawn]

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

GMO Food: What? Me worry?

I’ve never much cared whether the food I eat has been genetically modified (GMO). GMO plants have had their genes altered using DNA from different species of living organisms, bacteria, or viruses to get desired traits such as resistance to disease or tolerance of drought and pesticides. For example, in the 1990s, the ringspot virus decimated nearly half the papaya crops in Hawaii. Now, 77 percent of the crop has been genetically engineered to resist the virus.

The vast majority of our processed foods contain GMOs, but most fruits and vegetables have not been modified. Until just recently, no meat, fish, and poultry products approved for direct human consumption are bioengineered, although most of the feed for livestock and fish is derived from genetically modified corn, alfalfa, and other biotech grains. Recently, the FDA has approved a genetically engineered salmon as fit for human consumption—a first for animals. The engineering involves the use of a gene from other fish that keep the salmon’s growth hormone continuously active, such that it grows to market size in as little as half the time as a non-engineered salmon.

Seventeen European countries and nearly all countries in sub-Saharan Africa, which follow Europe’s lead, have banned the cultivation of genetically modified crops. In some conspiracy-theory-prone African countries people believe that eating GMO foods will turn you into a homosexual. Not only do GMO plants not turn you into a homosexual, the worldwide scientific consensus is that GMO foods are as safe to eat as conventionally cultivated food. What’s more, plants that have been genetically modified for, say, insect resistance, have caused a 40 percent reduction in insecticide use worldwide. Ditto for fungicides. But because of the bans, farmers in Tanzania, for example, have had their cassava crops wiped out by brown-streak disease, while farmers in neighboring Uganda area growing cassava with complete resistance to the virus. As Mark Lynas, political director of the Cornell Alliance for Science says, “Thanks to Europe’s Coalition of the Ignorant, we are witnessing a historic injustice perpetrated by the well fed on the food insecure.”

Well, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. A major revolution in gene editing is underway. It's a technique called CRISPR. Apparently, it’s fast and easy (well, for some people). Because it can be used to alter the human genome, it bears watching.

Next week: Medical reversals: Oops! My bad!

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Inflammation III: Anti-inflammatory diets

I tried an anti-inflammatory diet—thought it might help with my occasional joint pain. After a few days of it, I couldn’t stand it. These diets vary, but in general you’re not supposed to eat sweeteners, anything with gluten (wheat, barley, etc.), dairy products, eggs, caffeine, alcohol, and odds and ends of other things, including certain soy products, nuts, oils, and so forth. I can’t argue with eliminating certain foods, such as sugar and other refined carbohydrates (not that I do). But alcohol? Cheese? Butter? Caffeine? I just couldn’t do it. Life is too short.

Some scientists undertook a comprehensive review of studies in which they looked for evidence that certain diets reduced inflammatory bowel disease. They found only two that reduced inflammation: both were liquid mixtures of amino acids, simple sugars, and triglycerides that were administered with a tube through the nose. No eating regular meals in between. Other studies have not found any data that foods either cause inflammation or block inflammation. One study also showed that vitamins don’t counter inflammation and that they may increase your risk of developing cancer.

Apparently, plenty of people say they feel better as a result of following these diets. But so far there is only anecdotal evidence that the diets work. That is, no studies (except the liquid one I mentioned above), could prove a link between an anti-inflammatory diet and reduced inflammation. I do believe that eliminating certain foods help some people feel better—most probably because they were allergic or intolerant of certain substances, especially lactose and gluten. 

Like everything else, the nature of inflammation varies almost from person to person, and involves interactions among DNA, many kinds of gastrointestinal cells, and the peculiarities of a person’s gut microbiome. 

Remember that inflammation serves a vital role in the body. It’s a primary mechanism selected by nature to maintain the integrity of our bodies against the thousands of environmental attacks we receive every day. In the words, of Dr. Luigi Ferrucci, the scientific director of the National Institute on Aging, “Inflammation is part of our maintenance and repair system. Without it, we can’t heal.”

Next week: GMO foods: What? Me worry?

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.