In the news this month we’ve learned about a neotropical jumping spider discovered by Christopher Meehan of Villanova University in Mexico and Eric Olson of Brandeis in Costa Rica that is the only species of spider observed to subsist on a primarily vegetarian diet. Previously, spiders had not been known to consume any type of solid food, apart from occasional pollen fed to young in a single species of orb-weaver. The new species has been named Bagheera kiplingi.
And on the subject of vegetation, plant biologists at the University of Delaware and McMaster University in Canada conducted a study of more than 3,000 mustard seedlings and discovered that young plants are capable of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen explain why fresh eggs are more difficult to peel than older eggs. Bottom line: let your eggs sit for a few days before trying to make deviled eggs!
If your Mama was anything like mine, you no doubt grew up with the constant admonition that “you are what you eat.” And despite the silly position of the AMA back in the early 1980s that there was no evidence to support the idea that diet has any direct relationship with health, almost all mothers know better. Thus it’s not entirely unexpected that medical science should be learning about the many ways that diet does indeed affect health, but it is welcome to wise Moms everywhere.
First up, a paper published in the journal Science by a research team at the University of Wisconsin demonstrates that simply reducing the amount of food eaten works to blunt the effects of aging and significantly delay onset of age-relatted conditions like cancer, diabetes, heart disease and brain atrophy. The research was conducted over 20 years on Rhesus monkeys at the National Primate Research Center at UW-Madison.
Conclusion? A restricted calorie diet will help you live longer and stay healthier.
The American Dietetic Association has also released an updated position paper on vegetarian diets that concludes a well-planned meatless diet is both healthful and nutritionally adequate and can help prevent or even treat chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, cancer and heart disease.
Vegetarian diets have long been associated with lower blood cholesterol levels, lower risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure and reduced risk of type 2 diabetes. Because such diets are low-fat and generally provide more vitamins and minerals than a meat-based diet, the ADA has concluded that a meatless diet is appropriate for all stages of the human life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy and for athletes.
With ever increasing evidence that fewer calories, less meat and more fruits and vegetables can lead to a longer and healthier life, the number of vegetarians or semi-vegetarians among the population is expected to increase significantly over the next decade. Perhaps the most important take-away lesson from the evidence and research is that indulging in high-calorie processed foods and fatty meats to the point where a majority of the population weighs twice what they should weigh causes a huge chunk of the medical issues people suffer in the U.S.
We have all heard the increasing concern among public health officials about the “obesity crisis” in recent years as citizens of all ages get fatter and fatter – including, perhaps counterintuitively, the most financially challenged among us, traditionally considered the most nutritionally needy of all groups. Old pictures from the Great Depression era of the 1930s routinely showed the sunken faces and emaciated bodies of those who suffered most from the economic conditions.
The new Great Recession that became apparent last fall with the collapse of Wall Street and much of the world’s financial systems does not seem to be stemming the tide of obesity, and apparently much of the overall weight gain has occurred in just the past ~30+ years since the 1970s. We have heard about changes in diet to include more high fructose corn syrup instead of refined sugar in cheap snack foods and sodas, about more unhealthy fatty meats produced in factory farm intensives and fed unnatural diets, and we’ve seen the average size of a “single serving” meal at most fast food joints and restaurants practically double, contributing to people eating more and more of high-fat, high-calorie foods.
There has also been much said about increasing sedentary lifestyles, this lack of regular exercise contributing to the epidemic of obesity in children. But new research by associates of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention at Deaking University in Australia was presented to the European Congress on Obesity last week analyzing a variety of factors that show it really is all about how much we eat.
Increased Food Intake Alone Explains Rise in Obesity in U.S. tested 1,399 adults and 963 children to determine how many calories their bodies burn on a daily basis in normal living. Once this was determined, the researchers were able to calculate how much the individuals needed to eat in order to maintain a stable weight or growth curve in children. The bad news is that we’re eating a whole lot more calories than we burn, thus we get fatter and fatter.
It was determined that in order to get back to average individual weights of the 1970s, adults would have to consume about 500 fewer calories per day, children about 300 fewer calories. That may sound difficult until you realize that a single large hamburger averages 500 calories, and a small order of fries and medium soda amount to about 300. The same effect could be had if people got enough extra exercise to offset the increased calories, but it’s pretty obvious that’s not going to happen.
Professor Boyd Swinburn, the study’s leader, suggested to the WHO conference that while increased exercise should be encouraged for a range of benefits by public health agencies, more could likely be accomplished simply by programs that promote eating less.
It seems like the entire month of October has been one big Halloween Trick (not Treat) as the grotesque and blatantly illegal ‘melamine in food’ imported from China horror just keeps getting worse and worse. Some might wonder why all food products from China weren’t immediately banned back when tainted pet food cause the painful deaths of thousands of dogs and cats last year, once it was confirmed that Chinese state-owned food processors were adding the industrial plastic to wheat gluten to fool tests for protein content in this ubiquitous protein additive. Alas, imports were not banned, and now this dangerous adulterant is in hundreds of common food items.
Thousands of Chinese infants were poisoned when melamine was added to infant formulas and milk products. It’s in medicines exported and has caused sickness and death in Central and South America. Now it’s in candy and eggs and almost every wheat product from China. The US does not require country of origin labeling of foods, thus American consumers have no real way of knowing they’re buying poison.
Tainted Chinese Products Criminal Timeline traces the tainted Chinese food scandal back through 2004, and includes many other adulterants Americans have been ingesting. Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical. Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics. Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria. Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides. It is not a pretty picture, and our FDA has been criminally lax in their duty of protecting the safety of our food supply.
As for melamine, here’s an Update: now coffee, Snickers, KitKat, M&Ms and Heinz products such as baby cereals and crackers. The latest contamination is being found in eggs, which got there via tainted animal feed. This has caused United Nations officials to worry that it is also in chicken, pork, farmed fish and other meats.
Melamine causes kidney stones and kidney failure. The Chinese babies who died all died of kidney and organ failure. So it comes as no surprise that doctors are now seeing a rise in kidney stones in US children as young as 5. The situation is very, very serious.
Educate yourself! Fused Report has a cache of reports on melamine contamination from news organizations all over the world, and Food Standards offers a detailed risk assessment of the adulterant. There is a constantly updated list of tainted products available at the Natural Remedies Blog too, and with Halloween coming this Friday pay special attention to the candy list. Also see FDA allowing melamine in Halloween candy.
Protect yourself and your family, because our government’s FDA will not.
Links:
A Rise in Kidney Stones Seen in U.S. Children
Cache of News Reports on Melamine Contamination
Food Standards: detailed risk assessment
List of Contaminated Products
FDA allowing melamine in Halloween candy
It was bound to happen. Science Daily reports that research from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil entitled The non-equilibrium nature of culinary evolution has established that regional cuisines don’t evolve much. Even in a small world.
The researchers examined historical food preferences for ‘national’ diets in Britain, France and Brazil, and found that certain staples as well as unique ingredients remain in the cuisines despite modern access to restaurants specializing in regional or ‘national’ foods. And despite the modern availability of regional foods in grocery stores.
In other words, the Irish still love potatoes, the French still eat snails and frogs’ legs, the Germans still love sausages and sauerkraut, the Japanese still rely on fish stock and Central and South Americans still choose tortillas over Wonder Bread. Mediterranean peoples still consume lots of olive oil, and still have longer lives, less heart disease and lower cholesterol than the average American.
One thing that struck me odd in the article’s conclusion was the statement that…
“Some low fitness ingredients present in the initial recipes have a strong difficulty of being replaced and can even propagate during culinary growth. They are like frozen ‘cultural’ accidents.”
“Low fitness?” As in ‘fit’ for what? Last I checked, amaranth was still a high quality grain as well as greens supplying as much nutritional value as spinach (which, next to peppers, are highest in certain vitamins of all foods). Parsley and cilantro are still high-value greens as well, whether in salsa or tabouli. Potatoes – which originated in Peru – are still the closest thing to a ‘perfect food’ that exists, and the lowly chayote of Central America (singled out in this article) is rich in amino acids and vitamin C. It’s an important vegetable not just in Central and South America and the Caribbean, but also in Australia, Africa, Asia and Europe.
I expect that the foods one grows up with, the ones most associated with both family history (grandma’s pasta sauce) as well as ethnic heritage, are strongly imprinted in us as preferences at a young age. So while we might look forward to eating Thai on Wednesday or Mexican on Friday or Italian whenever the opportunity arises, day to day food choices will tend to be those we’re most familiar with. That’s cabbage and potatoes for me. What is it for you?
Fun Links:
American Recipes & History by Region
Chinese Regional Cooking Styles
Hawaii Regional Cuisine
Indian Regional Cuisine
The 2007 Farm Bill – now the 2008 Farm Bill, was passed by both chambers of Congress, vetoed by President Bush, then the veto was overridden by both houses and is now the ‘Law of the Land’. Politically, the bill isn’t perfect, there is still too much pork and payments to rich agribusiness concerns for their poor farming practices, and not enough clarifying guidelines for biofuels production and organic farming.
But it’s a lot better than no bill at all, which would have kept the last support bill in place for the foreseeable future. The new bill has incentives to clean up residue discharges in important watersheds, and supports for best practices in crop rotations, cover crops and low-chemical input farming. It’s still strong on commodity production (corn, wheat, rice), but does put some real support into farmer’s market promotions and expansion of organic markets. It does somewhat limit subsidies to near-millionaire commodity farmers, requires more fresh fruit and vegetables to be available in schools, increases food stamp benefits as tied to the price of food, allots priority funding to research into the bee die-off situation, and supports rural enterprise and microenterprise investments.
Research into the “typical American diet” and its relationship to serious health issues and obesity informs us that Americans eat way too much junk and not nearly enough healthy food. Which, in a country that rations health care by income level and allows insurance companies to exclude people who actually need health care, would seem to be an important issue to address with education and real food availability in public institutions such as schools.
In 2005 the University of Michigan’s Integrative Medicine Clinical Services published a new food pyramid based on “healing” foods. Which emphasized fresh, unprocessed fruits and vegetables over grains, legumes (beans) and the more fatty foods at the top. The Agricultural Research Service published this past weekend a study that showed alkaline-producing fresh fruits and vegetables help preserve muscle mass in older men and women.
And researchers from USDA’s Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory have released findings that demonstrate organic farming methods including crop rotation complexity can offer a 30% greater yield than simple corn-soybean rotations.
As demand for organic meat, milk and basic commodities rises about 20% per year in this country, improvements in the technology of organic production will serve to increase availability. It has long been known that reduced use of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilizers (most with highly questionable ‘inert ingredients’ such as toxic waste from industry) will also improve water quality and the general fertility of our ‘breadbasket’ agricultural base land. It is hoped that the new farm bill, by emphasizing changes that need to be made in these directions, will speed America’s switch to sustainable practices and improve citizen’s health significantly.
Michael Kramer, a professor of pediatrics at McGill University reported this week that breastfeeding raises children’s IQ and improves their academic performance later in childhood.
Their study evaluated children in 31 Belarusian hospitals and clinics. Half of the women were directly encouraged to breastfeed exclusively, the other half did things the ‘normal’ way (for Belorussia). Six and a half years later the children’s IQs were tested and their teachers submitted academic performance ratings. Scores on both were significantly higher for the children of women encouraged to breastfeed, though there is no indication that the researchers confirmed how many of those mothers actually did breastfeed or for how long.
“Our study provides the strongest evidence to date that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding makes kids smarter,” Kramer said.
While it is generally accepted these days that it is far better for a baby to be breastfed than raised on infant formula or cow’s milk – for a number of excellent reasons including immunities and strengthened immune systems – the reporting of this particular study makes a fairly standard assertion that association of factors (correlation) must equate to cause. Another study reported this week holds that early consumption of cow’s milk increases risk of Type-1 diabetes.
Still, given the infant deaths attributed to the marketing and distribution of soy-based infant formula to mothers in third world countries (where the water is nasty), any encouragement of the idea that human babies should drink human milk is welcomed. Here in the first world, virtually all women of childbearing age carry burdens of chemicals and heavy metals that are measurable in their breast milk, but generally at a lower level than the water in third world countries contains.
If women – and their doctors – can be persuaded that breastfeeding makes children healthier and smarter, only good can come of it. Someday we might even find ourselves living in a modern first world society that actually views mothers breastfeeding babies as normal and endearing rather than a blatant abuse of sexual organs! That would be a refreshing development.
The scary take-home lesson from the 2004 documentary Super Size Me has some new scientific confirmation from recent research at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, though evidence that a fast food diet leads to liver problems and obesity wasn’t what the researchers set out to find.
You Are What You Eat is about research that found – using mice instead of chimpanzees or humans – that some of the obvious differences between humans and chimpanzees can be attributed to the differences in our diets.
The research was published in PLoS One 3(1): e1504 entitled “Somel M., Franz H., Mueller U., Lachmann M., et al (2008) Human and Chimpanzee Gene Expression Differences Replicated in Mice Fed Different Diets.
They fed lab mice one of three different diets for two weeks – raw fruits and vegetables, Institute cafeteria food, and straight McDonalds junk. The fresh fruit and veggies diet differed very significantly on liver effects of the other two diets, which caused thousands of gene expression changes. The McDonalds mice also got fat. The conclusion?
“A significant fraction of the genes that changed in the mouse livers had previously been observed as different between humans and chimpanzees. This indicates that the differences observed in these particular genes might be caused by the difference in human and chimpanzee diets.”
The researchers also noted that these genes appear to have evolved faster than other genes, possibly because of adaptation to new diets. I could not find any indication in the article that humans who go raw vegan become chimpanzees, or that chimpanzees fed cafeteria food or fries and shakes become human. But it is quite interesting that diet alone can significantly affect gene expression (and evolution). Seems that evolutionary biology may have to include diet-caused gene changes as yet another mechanism for generating biodiversity.
Now, it might give you a chuckle, as it did me. But come on, folks… I hereby add ‘Irresponsible Use of Illustration’ in science news reporting as yet another category for the Science News Booby Prizes at year’s end. After last week’s sordid destruction of Nobel Laureate James Watson’s storied career as a notorious bigot, this sort of thing can definitely make one wonder what the heck these science reporters are thinking.
If they are in fact thinking at all.
The Annals of Improbable Research has announced the winners of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize, awarded Thursday night (October 4) at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre.
The Ig Nobels honor the contributions of off-beat scientists to humanity’s off-beat knowledge, or at least major contributions to humanity’s fine-tuned sense of the completely absurd. For instance, this years’ Ig Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to the U.S. Air Force’s Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, for research into a chemical weapon designed to make enemy soldiers become irresistible to each other – the “Gay Bomb.”
No, the Air Force neglected to send any of its prize-winning researchers to Cambridge to formally accept the Prize. Reminds me of a line Tommy Lee Jones delivered in Men In Black, with liberties…
“We in the Air Force do not have a sense of humor that we are aware of.” Luckily the sciencey-types at MIT do have a sense of humor.
I was particularly intrigued by the world’s first comprehensive study of injuries that are caused by sword-swallowing. Since one of the authors of the study is himself a sword-swallower, he did know a little bit about what to look for. Your basic throat abrasions, perforated esophagi and punctured blood vessels.
The Ig Nobel Prize for Nutrition went to Cornell professor Brian Wansink, who established once and for all that Americans judge when they’re full with their eyes instead of their stomachs. In order to establish this, Wansink designed some clever soup bowls with hidden tubes which slowly refilled them as the diner ate. Turns out the diners managed to eat nearly 75% more soup at the sitting, even though they reported not feeling any more full than if they’d eaten a regular bowl of soup. No wonder Americans are obese!
Supersizing works.
Another Ig Nobel went to a Japanese researcher who developed a method of extracting vanilla flavoring from cow dung. Yum! And a group of Spanish scientists found that rats sometimes can’t tell the difference between the Japanese and Dutch languages – if they’re spoken backwards.
For the full list of 2007 winners, a blow-by-blow of the gala ceremonies and other festivities, check out these links..
Links:
The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize winners
Ig Nobels honor crazy science with a point
Omni Brain Blog: Ig Nobel Prizes Announced