Obesity; More Than Just 'Calories'?

It would appear that simply cutting out 'calories in' via radical surgery isn't properly understood.  It is premised on a naive 'mechanical' model and the results/success achieved are inconsistent.  But now,

• ...a slew of high-profile animal studies is identifying potential mechanisms in how the gut adapts to its strange new configuration: with sweeping changes in bacterial populations, bile acids, hormone secretions and tissue growth. The hope is that more research on what happens after bariatric surgery will enable physicians to identify who will respond best — and even lead to ways of altering metabolism without resorting to the knife.

Get a load of that last line!  Who'da thunk it?

When we look after/keep animals and plants, no one questions the wisdom of subjecting them to conditions similar to their 'ancestral' past.  Yet we assume our own inherent adaptability means we can subject ourselves to incredibly novel foods and physical environments with little detriment to our health.

Denmark's Fat Tax 2

Denmark's Fat Tax has come unstuck according to a report in Nature,

• A world-leading ‘fat tax’ has been abolished in Denmark, with the country admitting the controversial attempt at engineering a healthier populace has failed. A planned tax on some high-sugar foods has also been abandoned, marking a setback for advocates of this method of encouraging health.

I had my doubts it would work but didn't think Adam Smith's invisible hand would deliver the knock out blow!

• ...the country’s tax on unhealthy, high-fat products had driven up prices and put jobs at risk.

Follow the money.

Bad Pharma

There is something of a seismic shift going on in the UK.  Where once we revered celebrity chefs, Geek are now taking over the airwaves - or as I like to call them, intelligent people offering informative, educational media content. 

Ben Goldacre is one of a whole host of 'antiwoo', scientifically-minded people to have entered popular culture - following on from the likes of Feinman and Sagan, through Dawkins and Hitchens, and now alongside the likes of Brian Cox and Robin Ince.

Goldacre probably can't cook as well as 'Jamie', but when it comes to 'science', and in particular medical research Goldacre is one of the brightest guys out there.  I blogged some time ago about Bad Science, his first book, and he has now followed this up with Bad Pharma, an audacious expose of how the pharmaceutical industry is motivated largely by avarice, and how those quality gates at every level, designed to protect the patient, have proved largely worthless,

• ‘Bad Science’ hilariously exposed the tricks that quacks and journalists use to distort science, becoming a 400,000 copy bestseller. Now Ben Goldacre puts the $600bn global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. What he reveals is a fascinating, terrifying mess.
  
  Doctors and patients need good scientific evidence to make informed decisions. But instead, companies run bad trials on their own drugs, which distort and exaggerate the benefits by design. When these trials produce unflattering results, the data is simply buried. All of this is perfectly legal. In fact, even government regulators withhold vitally important data from the people who need it most. Doctors and patient groups have stood by too, and failed to protect us. Instead, they take money and favours, in a world so fractured that medics and nurses are now educated by the drugs industry.
  
  Patients are harmed in huge numbers.

There is a great extract in today's Guardian.  Me?  I am eagerly awaiting delivery of my copy and in the meantime am happy to leave the tin foil in the drawer.  Follow the money!

UPDATE: David Calquhoun has a great review of the book here.

Popcorn Lung

I blogged about popcorn lung a month or so back. It seems that it is not just the workers at risk. From the BBC:

• A US man has been awarded $7.2m (£4.4m) in damages after claiming he developed "popcorn lung" from inhaling the artificial butter in microwave popcorn.
  
  A Colorado jury agreed with Wayne Watson that a popcorn manufacturer should have had warning labels that the bag's fumes were dangerous to inhale.  

Next visit to the cinema, look around at who is eating this stuff!

Different Sides, Same Coin

I've often wondered whether a whole host of modern ailments aren't all simple manifestation of the same problem; poor nutrition and inadequate exercise.  This range of ailments may range from hair loss (not necessarily MPB) and tooth decay, to obesity, CHD, Altzeimers and cancer.

We are biological systems, incredibly complicated and research is continually turning up intricate relationships.  Recently I posted up a story on gut flora and mood.  Today the BBC carried a story on obesity and its relationship with cognitive decline (Obesity 'bad for brain' by hastening cognitive decline):

• Being overweight is not just bad for waistlines but for brains too, say researchers who have linked obesity to declining mental performance.
  
  Experts are not sure why this might be, but say metabolic changes such as high blood sugar and raised cholesterol are likely to be involved.
  
  Obesity has already been tipped as a risk factor for dementia. The work, published in Neurology, tracked the health of more than 6,000 British people over a decade.
  
  The participants, who were aged between 35 and 55, took tests on memory and other cognitive skills three times over a 10-year period.

In some ways losing my mind worries me more than losing my hustle.  I don't want to live forever, I just want compressed morbidity.  Very compressed.

Talking of living forever, who'd have thought that popcorn flavouring posed a risk to workers?

• A butter flavouring used in the production of microwave popcorn could be a respiratory hazard to workers and could even alter gene expression in the brain. This is the conclusion of researchers from the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and West Virginia University, investigating the effects of 2,3-pentanedione on laboratory rats. Ironically, 2,3-pentanedione was introduced to replace the flavouring diacetyl, which was found to have similar health effects over 10 years ago.

Popcorn; considered benign and sold largely to kids, bought by their loving parents.  Do people actually eat this stuff? (Yeah, yeah, I know that eating it is safe, it is the inhaling that is the problem.)

'Popcorn workers lung' (Bronchiolitis obliterans), is news to me.  I don't eat it, but what really surprise me was this line from one of the researchers:

• ‘Our study also supports established recommendations that flavourings should be substituted only when there is evidence that the substitute is less toxic than the agent it replaces.’

Now that reads to me like 'they' are still happy to kill you, albeit with something less immediately terminal.

Baise moi!

Follow the Money

Money pushes out other norms of behaviour, most recently evidenced by the phone hacking scandal in the British Media.  Money can't buy you love, but it does give you power (and if it doesn't give you power it is a surrogate for power).  Bankers, Pharma and Politicians have all fallen victim to this behavioural modification and as the Catholic Church has illustrated with such clarity, nothing will corrupt as much as a desire to protect power.

As the major pillars of our civilisation crumble around us, it should come as no surprise to find that the fitness industry is similarly devoid of integrity.  The Guardian today ran with the following story, 'Research pours cold water on alleged benefits of sports products':

• "There is a striking lack of evidence to support the vast majority of sports-related products that make claims related to enhanced performance or recovery, including drinks, supplements and footwear," conclude researchers led by Dr Carl Heneghan of Oxford's centre for evidence-based medicine.
  ...
  Makers of sports drinks have succeeded in persuading people that they need to drink them, rather than water, and forged links with leading sports bodies in a bid to gain the public's trust and normalise their use, according to a joint BMJ-BBC investigation.
  
  Phrases such as "stay ahead of thirst", promotion of the "science of hydration" and advising sports enthusiasts to consume sports drinks before starting to exercise have helped create a global industry that forecasters Mintel estimated will be worth $1.6bn by 2016, they say.

The best line goes to Dr Colin Cable, the pharmaceutical science information officer at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society,

• "However, for the vast majority of sporting participants, it is questionable whether any form of supplementation will be necessary, as a healthy balanced diet will provide their body's requirements for protein, carbohydrate, vitamins and minerals,"

I hate to be a cynic, but where there are big profits to be made, wherever people have power, where there is a lack of transparency or where people don't have any skin in the game, don't expect individuals to escape such behaviours.

Myths About Your 5-A-Day

Dispatches (Channel 4). Available to watch now on 4OD.  A hit-and-miss program (the suffer from saturatedfatophobia) on a nutrition-basis, but one that does a good and job of showing how profit push out other norms of behaviour.  In this instance, putting various Food and Drink associations in charge of the DOHs '5-a-day' program has lead to baked beans, fruit bread and chocolate cookies qualifying as one of your '5-a-day':

• Dispatches reveals how the crucial five-a-day message has been hijacked by the food industry and manufacturers use their own five-a-day labels on certain processed foods with high sugar, fat or salt content.One ready-meal bearing a 'one of your five-a-day' logo contained almost 8 grams of salt - more than is recommended for the entire day.And we uncover how the government is failing to curb the problem, leading to increased consumer confusion as to exactly what counts as part of our five-a-day under the original intentions of the scheme.When the campaign was first launched in 2002, the Department of Health specified that fresh produce as well as frozen, tinned, juiced and dried fruit and veg all constituted part of our five-a-day. But these were only guidelines.
  
  It also created an official logo which can only be displayed on foods that don't contain added salt, sugar or fat, but the food industry saw the advantages of promoting its products with a five-a-day message and started to create their own labels with no such restrictions.
  
  Simon Capewell, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology, University of Liverpool, says: 'The own brand fruit and veg logos that the different companies have made up are unregulated, they're unrestricted, it's complete open season out there.'

We've got to the stage where 'fractional' values apply - such that a manufacturer may claim that their product is 'half of one of your 5-a-day'. 

Use of 'half' in this case is ironic because that also happens to be the combined IQ of those who thought up this policy.

Baise Moi!

Faster than the Speed of Sound

Hot on the heels of Gary Connery's recent wingsuit heroics, step forwards Felix Baumgartner.  Felix will attempt to jump from the edge of space this August, and in the process break several records set over half a century ago by Joseph Kittinger.  You can see an excellent video of Kittinger's jump here (starting around 4:21) and it is truly surreal,

• On August 16, 1960, Joseph Kittinger jumped his last Excelsior jump, doing so from an air-thin height of 102,800 feet (31,334 meters). From that nearly 20 miles altitude, his tumble toward terra firma took some 4 minutes and 36 seconds. Exceeding the speed of sound during the fall, Kittinger used a small stabilizing chute before a larger, main parachute opened in the denser atmosphere. He safely touched down in barren New Mexico desert, 13 minutes 45 seconds after he vaulted into the void. The jump set records that still stand today, among them, the highest parachute jump, the longest freefall, and the fastest speed ever attained by a human through the atmosphere. Somewhat in contention is Kittinger's use of the small parachute for stabilization during his record-setting fall. Roger Eugene Andreyev, a Russian, is touted as holding the world's free fall record of 80,325 feet (24,483 meters), made on November 1, 1962.

Felix Baumgartner seeks to go higher and fall faster!  There is a great interview with him here,

• Later this summer - the plan is to do it in August - I will get into a pressurised space capsule in Roswell, New Mexico, go up to 120,000 feet [36,600 metres], depressurise the capsule and step out. Within the first 35 seconds I'll accelerate so fast that I'll break the speed of sound.

One of the dangers mentioned is Felix going in to a flat spin,

• If you spin with your head towards the centre, blood leaves the head and you pass out. If you spin with your feet to the centre, you get a red-out. The blood rushes to your head, you get an aneurysm in your brain or a cerebral haemorrhage. There is a g metre on Felix's wrist that controls for a flat spin and we developed an emergency drogue parachute, which can pull his head high and stop the rotation.

Gripping.

Urban Climbing

Our Russian friends showing once again that they live on the edge - and then some.  The guy's expression at the end is priceless!

Is YOUR Gym as Wild as This?

5/9

Can it be true?  Speechless.

Eric Topol on Statins

Statins eh?  Where would we be without them?  Eric Topol's op-ed in the New York Times gives us a clue - and another truly 'baise moi' moment.  Before reading it, it is worth reminding ourselves that we should always follow the money....and guess which drugs are the most profitable?

Landing a Wingsuit

I've posted some Jeb Corliss footage on this site - flying 'The Crack' is pretty impressive.  All of this pales in to insignificance though, when people talk of landing a wingsuit without a canopy!  Gary Connery is that man,

• Next month Connery will realize a lifelong ambition of jumping from a helicopter 2,400ft above the height of the box rig over Ridge Wood to the ENE of Henley on Thames. Gary will drop for 3 seconds before his suit starts to fly. He will then accelerate to approximately 80mph. He will get into his tried and tested best glide position where the speed will decrease to 60 mph forward speed with a 22mph vertical descent rate. The whole flight should last about 50 seconds and will come to an end with Gary landing on a box rig.
  
  “I am excited and overwhelmed at the prospect of sticking a new post in the runway of aviation history. I am 100% confident of my abilities/methods to achieve this landing on what will become a historic day,” said Connery. “I am very pleased to be working with Bremont on this as we very much share the same principles; everything to do with this jump is about precision and timing. Working with the manufacture Tonysuits we have only now been able to develop the wingsuit technology to be able to do this jump. At this current pace of development the possibilities of future wing suit design will change the world of aviation.”

(Yes I did check the calendar).

Class-action suit against Vibram

Sports One Source report a class-action suit against Vibram USA,

• The lawsuit asserts that; 1) health benefits claims Vibram FiveFingers has used to promote the shoes are deceptive; 2) that FiveFingers may increase injury risk as compared to running in conventional running shoes, and even when compared to running barefoot; 3) that there are no well-designed scientific studies that support FiveFingers claims.

I can't help thinking that point three applies to most modern sportswear products, cosmetics and, to be honest, the pharmaceutical industry.  The irony here is that V5Fs force runners to adopt a more 'evolutionary concordant' forefoot strike.  The product is sold with cautionary materials emphasising this point and offering guidance, but for some people somewhere, "..SOMEONE MUST PAY BECAUSE I HURT MYSELF!"  Sales of V5F have grown 300% a year for the last 5 years, so we should follow the money on this one.

I've achieved ultimate paleo-wanker status in that I often train completely barefoot.  My V5Fs are reserved for wild terrain, but much of my training is physically barefoot.

I await the day some train-wreck of a fat person with metabolic syndrome sues a water company for recommending they eschew 'DietSugarCrap' in favour of a glass of water.  No doubt Mr Trainwreck will injure himself/nearly drown during the the transition...and those bastards in hydrology will be forced to pay....

Baise moi.

Chrome Users

I've just noticed that if you browse my site using Google Chrome it embeds links on to certain keywords like 'claims', 'diet' and so forth.  This is really fucking annoying GOOGLE, so please stop doing it.  I do not endorse any such link and please do not think it is me adding these grubby little links in to the text.

IE users - you can relax as no such embedding occurs with IE.  However users of IE shouldn't relax too much given the historical security issues with this browser!

Meat Fail

100% this does not pass the PGZ test:

• "Mironov is certain tissue-engineered meat will eventually be developed: "Of course there are people who think this is Frankenstein food. They see it as unnatural, but there is nothing unnatural here. We use animal cells and grow them in a cultured media. The only difference is that we don't kill any animals." The first-generation products are most likely to be chopped meat, with a long-term goal to grow muscle tissue. Potentially, any animal's muscle tissue could be grown through the in vitro process, as well as milk, cheese and eggs. So far all the meat "made" has been nearly colourless, tasteless and lacking texture. Scientists may have to add fat and even lab-grown blood and colourants."

Race to server up artificial chicken from The Guardian.

Crave

I'd taken this photo back in November and an item on BBC news this morning reminded me of it which reported on the marketing 'food' to children online.  I say food, but I am not sure Krave meets the definition of anything but neo-poverty food.

I'm looking forward to marketing my own cereal called "Addykt" based upon a similar recipe.  Meantime:

• crave (krv) v. craved, crav·ing, craves
  
  1. To have an intense desire for. See Synonyms at desire.
  2. To need urgently; require.
  3. To beg earnestly for; implore. See Synonyms at beg.

A massive social media campaign has been launched to back Krave.  You have to be 16 to sign up for Krave's newsletter and 17 to play their games on Facebook but lets not kid ourselves as to who will be buying this stuff - after all, it is not on a top shelf, nor does it bear any kind of age restriction on the packaging.  In fact I found it on a shelf easily accessible to a toddler and tucked in next to "children's" cereals.  I cannot think of a worse start to the day.

Follow this link to see the nutritional profile of Krave.  What I like about the dumb-ass nutritional information on the box is that it is based upon a 30g serving.  This is the intellectual equivalent of selling alcohol in smaller measures to alcoholics.

I'd like to see the modal demographic that buy this stuff.  Perhaps if we saw those folk on a billboard the penny would drop...

Baise moi.

(Find out how much energy there is in breakfast cereal with this experiment.)

Time Flies

We spent this evening at a carol service in aid of a local farm trust.  The farm is a true working farm and offers residential and day visits to kids from inner-city infant schools (aged around 4-6).

The kids are bussed out to the farm and spend a day or more working on the farm collecting eggs, watching the lambing/calving, or if it is snowy, simply sledging down the hills.  It gives them an escape from city living and offers them a chance to see sights, sounds and smells that would otherwise go unknown to them, and a chance to engage with real food.

A representative from one of these infant schools got up to address the audience and offer thanks for our support,

• "We've been running visits from our school since the early 1980's and the pupils and ex-pupils always reflect fondly on their time at the farm including those that are now parents and grandparents....."

The Food Hospital: Interesting....

Here is the rundown of this week's episode of TFH:

• This week The Food Hospital welcomes patients with conditions from the common to the bizarre. Anne is a menopausal woman with hot flushes that are affecting both her daily life and her self confidence. Teenager Taigh seems to be a healthy fitness instructor but is terrified of eating vegetables. A photographer, Kate, also comes to The Food Hospital with a disabling disease that food may in fact be causing, and a pair of body builders with incredible appetites find out whether their diets really are healthy. Also Dr Pixie McKenna investigates how reliable DIY food intolerance tests actually are and the results of the Insomnia Big Food Trial are revealed.

The Food Hospital: A Horse by Any Other Name

I have just watched this weeks' Food Hospital:

• In the fifth week of The Food Hospital GP Gio Miletto, Dietitian Lucy Jones and Gastric Consultant Shaw Somers meet Ellie who suffers from a rare and chronic odour disorder. A teenager, Toby, comes to The Food Hospital hoping to find a solution for his extreme eczema which sparks teasing at school. Michelle is a mother in excruciating pain due to gallstones which she says is more painful than child labour. The team also demonstrates an easy to make recipe for hungover heads. Dr Pixie McKenna investigates the health claims on packaging and reveals the results of the latest survey.

Surprise, surprise, Shaw Somers recommended a NEOLITHIC DIET ("Huzzah!).   Yep, Somers recommended we eat as we did in the stone age in a bid to help deal with gallstones - and what is more there is evidence that this kind of diet can 'reduce risk of heart disease'!

Let's back up a minute and reflect upon the main problem with this program.  As I have said a few times already, unhappy with entertaining the idea that some consumer items masquerading as food can lead to malady, TFH assume that pretty much everything sold to us as food IS food, and that people who are sick (sickness that could NOT possibly come from poor nutritional choices), can seek remedy in the medicinal qualities of food.  This is 'arse about face'.  It is not so much that 'real food' food is curing us, it is that much of what is sold to us as food is poisoning us.


Now let's back up once more.  What is a horse?  Well, it is big and white/brown/black/grey, a bit bigger than cow-sized, has a leg in each corner and goes "neigh".  We know a horse when we see it.  But do we know a Neolithic Diet when we see it?
Well TFH get something right.  A Neolithic Diet is low in processed foods.  So far so good.  But then the voice over goes on to say that the cause of gallstones is a diet "high in fat and cholesterol and low in fibre" and as part of the Neolithic/Caveman Diet Michelle should eat fresh foods including 'low fat dairy'.

Noooooooooooo!  The stupid, make it stop!

Needless to say after 8 weeks Michelle had only one episode of pain (at the outset of the diet), was 'less hungry all the time', and felt 'generally better'.  (Only an ultrasound could conclude if the gallstones had disappeared.)

Just imagine what a REAL Caveman/Neolithic diet could do eh?

Baise Moi!