Laurie Endicott Thomas, Author at Where Do Gorillas Get Their Protein?

Reports of “Alien DNA” are greatly exaggerated

The headlines sounded really exciting: Arsenic bacteria with DNA completely alien to what we know. This sounded like the stuff of science fiction! What does “completely alien DNA” mean? Every living thing ever observed by scientists uses DNA to carry its genetic information from one generation to the next. (Yes, some viruses use RNA instead of DNA, but viruses don’t completely qualify as living things.) Does this new “arsenic bacterium” use different base pairs or a different genetic code than all of the other living things on earth? If so, where did this bacterium come from?

The first clue that this story is a gross exaggeration comes in the admission that this “arsenic bacteria” species belongs to the Gammaproteobacteria, a class of gram-negative bacteria that includes many familiar species, including the E. coli in our bowels. Why are these arsenic bacteria “alien”? Actually, they’re not. They just do something that had never been observed before. When grown in an environment that is poor in phosphorus but rich in arsenic, these “arsenic bacteria” use arsenic where they would ordinarily have used phosphorus. The arsenic can even get incorporated into their DNA in the spots where phosphorus would ordinarily go. However, the DNA still uses the same base pairs and still codes for the same amino acids. Nothing important really changes. If you gave them some phosphorus, they’d probably go back to using that.

The finding that some bacteria can use arsenic where they would normally use phosphorus is interesting but not completely unexpected, because arsenic is just below phosphorus in the periodic table of the elements. Arsenic and phosphorus therefore have similar chemical properties, which is part of the reason why arsenic is poisonous to human beings.

Why is the discovery of “arsenic bacteria” important? One expert argues that the earth has a limited supply of concentrated deposits of phosphates, and that these deposits are rapidly being depleted. That’s true but completely irrelevant. We can’t substitute arsenic for phosphorus in agriculture or just about anything else, because arsenic is a deadly poison! Is it really comforting to know that after the world’s human population has collapsed because of resource depletion, some bacterial populations will go on without us?

In other words, NASA did not discover a new life form, or any alien DNA, or even anything truly unexpected about bacteria. The finding that some bacteria can use arsenic in the place of phosphorus under extreme conditions is interesting to a biochemist or a microbiologist, but it doesn’t deserve the overwrought, misleading headlines.

Nonsensical Study About White Rice

So Why Is Diabetes Rare in China?

A recent study has warned us that people who eat white rice instead of brown rice are more likely to get diabetes! But it leaves out a crucial piece of information: people in Asian countries whose diet is based heavily on white rice are practically immune to type 2 diabetes. The take-home message from this study isn’t that white rice is harmful, or that it would make much difference if you ate brown rice instead. It’s that we should be wary of researchers who fail to read the basic literature on nutrition before they design their research.

Brown rice is the whole-grain version of rice. To make brown rice, you remove only the husk of the rice seed. To make white rice, you also grind off the bran layer and the germ, which is the embryo of the rice seed. In most of the areas where rice is the staple of the diet, people prefer white rice, for two very practical reasons: brown rice goes rancid very easily, and it takes a lot longer to cook.

Polishing off the bran and germ of the rice seed removes the oils that can cause spoilage. Unfortunately, it also removes most of the vitamin B₁ (thiamine) from the rice. Originally, white rice was an expensive food, reserved largely for rich people who could afford a varied diet, so the lack of vitamin B₁ in their rice wasn’t a big deal. Unfortunately, when the invention of steam-powered rice mills meant that lots of poor people were subsisting heavily on white rice, a debilitating and potentially deadly deficiency disease called beriberi became endemic in Asia. After chemists identified thiamine and figured out how to make it cheaply to “enrich” white rice, beriberi ceased to be a common problem. Even so, brown rice is better for you because it’s a source of fiber.

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, a German-born American physician named Walter Kempner recognized the health benefits of a plant-based diet centered on rice. Kempner recognized that heart disease and diabetes were rare in Asia, where people ate a rice-based diet that was low in fat and cholesterol. He started recommending a diet based on rice, fruit, fruit juices, and sugar for patients with severe high blood pressure and kidney disease. His spectacular results with these patients encouraged him to recommend this rice-based diet for people with heart disease and diabetes. Those patients also got dramatic benefits, even though most of these patients were eating white rice. So where did the authors of the study published in Archives of Internal Medicine get the idea that white rice might cause diabetes?

It’s been obvious since the 1870s that type 2 diabetes is linked to obesity. We’ve known since the 1930s that the poor glucose tolerance that underlies it is linked to a high-fat diet and can be reversed by a switch to a starchy diet. The China-Cornell-Oxford Project, also known as the China Study, demonstrated that people who are eating a low-fat diet based heavily on white rice and vegetables stay slim and are virtually immune to diabetes. So why did the researchers just try to implicate white rice as a cause of diabetes? Could it be that they have never bothered to read the historical literature on the subject?

If you are eating the standard American diet, you are at high risk for obesity, type 2 diabetes, various kinds of cancer, and a wide assortment of other degenerative diseases. That’s because those diseases have been linked to a high intake of animal protein, fat, and cholesterol. You can dramatically reduce your risk of those diseases by switching to a low-fat (<10% of calories), high-fiber diet based on plant foods. As long as you get enough thiamine and enough fiber in your diet, it doesn’t matter much if the rice you eat is white.

Photo by sarae

Reunion With a Gorilla

What’s Next, an Atherosclerosis Acceptance Movement?

The Hidden Danger of the “Fat Acceptance” Movement

You know the old saying, “If something is too good to be true….” Well, the “fat acceptance” movement is telling people something that sounds too good to be true. They are insisting that people can be “healthy at any size” and sometimes even that being overweight is healthier than being slim. They’re wrong, and the smarter and more educated people among the “fat acceptance” movement should know better. They “cherry pick” misleading findings from a few studies and ignore a vast scientific literature on the effects of diet on health. Such behavior is sickening, and the advice they give is dangerous.

Here’s the simple truth: excess body fat is only one of the possible bad effects of eating the wrong kind of food. Eating too much fat and too much animal protein can send you to an early grave even if you are thin and exercise a lot. The classic example is Jim Fixx, author of The Complete Book of Running, a 1977 bestseller that launched the running boom. Fixx had claimed that his grueling exercise regimen, which had enabled him to lose 60 pounds, allowed him to eat as much as he wanted of whatever he wanted. When I read that in his book, I thought, “But what about cholesterol?” So I was saddened, but not surprised, when Fixx dropped dead at age 52 of a heart attack while running. To my disgust, the media reacted to his death by asking whether running was good or bad for you, ignoring the obvious dietary angle to the story.

The simple truth is that eating the wrong kind of food can kill you, even if it doesn’t make you fat. Another simple truth is that you can’t outrun cholesterol. As a member of the high-IQ club Mensa, Fixx should have been smart enough to figure that out before it was too late. Unfortunately, he believed what he wanted to believe, and ate whatever he wanted to eat, and in the end it killed him.

As I mentioned, obesity is only one of the bad effects that is likely to result from eating the standard American diet–not just the heavily processed “junk food” that everyone knows is bad for you, but the meat and dairy products and eggs and fish that the US Department of Agriculture has been encouraging us to eat.

Collectively, the bad effects of eating the standard American diet are called “Western diseases.” This is because medical doctors who had been trained in Europe and the United States were stunned to find that these health problems, which were common back home, were rare to nonexistent in Asia and Africa. Besides overweight and obesity, they include heart disease, diabetes, various cancers, arthritis, varicose veins, multiple sclerosis, etc. etc. etc. Western diseases were (and still are) the major causes of death and disability in the United States and Europe because people there eat too much animal protein and too much fat. These diseases were rare in Asia and Africa because the populations were eating a low-fat, largely plant-based diet. A monumental study of nutritional epidemiology in China (http://www.thechinastudy.com/) showed in detail how closely the consumption of animal protein and fat were linked to many of these diseases. The less animal-based food and fat people ate, the healthier they could be.

The good news is that if you eat the diet that will protect you against the other “Western diseases,” your weight problem will solve itself. People who eat a low-fat (<10% of calories) diet based on unrefined plant foods rapidly become heart-attack-proof (total cholesterol, <150 mg/dL) and can prevent and even reverse many of the other Western diseases. It’s hard to stay fat when you are eating a truly healthy diet. When overweight Americans switch to a low-fat, purely plant-based diet, they lose weight easily without having to count calories or limit their portions. They can eat to their hearts’ content and still stay slim. The “fat acceptance” advocates overlook that obvious fact.

The “fat acceptance” advocates are right that thin does not equal healthy. But they are wrong when they say that you can be healthy at any size. Rather than wasting their time trying to make people feel better about being fat, they should work toward educating people about a truly healthy diet, which will enable people to improve their own health and maintain a desirable weight without feeling hungry. The activists should also use their political clout to improve the nutrition curriculum at medical schools, which has been shown repeatedly over the past 40 years to be inadequate.

On one point, I do agree with the fat acceptance advocates. I think that people should be treated with respect regardless of their size and state of health. However, I feel that overweight people deserve to be told the truth about how their weight affects their health and about how their food choices affect both their health and their weight.

A Famous Vegan: Sports Illustrated’s 1973 Athlete of the Year

Vegans aren’t creatures from the planet Vegas. They’re individuals who won’t eat any animal products at all. Here’s a famous vegan athlete, who was named Sports Illustrated Male Athlete of the Year in 1973. I vividly remember watching this race.

Now, there are some naysayers who will quibble that he was wearing leather, which a true vegan would refuse to do. I would argue that he probably would have preferred to run around naked.

Photo by santanartist

Potato, Mushroom, Cauliflower Soup

This is an easy, delicious soup that I like to serve for company.

Just peel and dice a bunch of potatoes and several onions. Add some cauliflower and a handful of mushrooms. Add almost enough water to cover. Bring it to a boil and let it simmer until all the vegetables are soft, about 45 minutes. Puree it in a blender and serve. You can dress it up with a few mushrooms sauteed in red wine, or you can serve it with a few drops of sherry.

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment

Does Deliberate Starvation Cause Eating Disorders?

During World War II, nutrition researcher Ancel Keys (the inventor of the “K ration”) realized that large numbers of civilians would suffer from starvation during the war. To study the effects of starvation and determine the best methods for rehabilitation of the victims of starvation, he needed a population of starving people. Since none were available locally, he worked with the government to recruit a group of conscientious objectors willing to starve themselves. The study, conducted at the University of Minnesota, came to be known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Early results from this experiment were widely used by aid workers in the months after the guns fell silent, and an enormous two-volume textbook titled The Biology of Human Starvation was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1950.

Such an experiment could never be repeated today, because it would be forbidden by the rules put in place after the horrors of Nazi experimentation in the concentration camps were revealed. Yet many of the volunteers reported years later that participation in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment was one of the most important and most meaningful experiences of their lives.

Among the most surprising and disturbing findings of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment were the psychological effects of starvation. The men in the study had been subjected to extensive psychological testing before their period of starvation began. At the beginning of the study, they were mentally healthy, with no history of depression, eating disorders, or problems with body image. Yet during the experiment, many of the men exhibited problems that recognizable today as features of anorexia and bulimia. This poses a disturbing question: Are anorexia and bulimia and so on triggered by the conventional “portion control” strategy for weight loss?

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Bring back the American chestnut!

Here’s a recipe for castagnaccio, or Italian chestnut cake!

https://food52.com/blog/11972-tuscan-chestnut-cake-castagnaccio

I made some on Saturday, and it was delicious! It’s basically made of chestnut flour and water. The recipe calls for a little bit of olive oil, but you might be able to omit that.

Chestnuts are called “the grain that grows on trees” because they have the nutritional profile of a grain: lots of carbohydrate, very little fat. So they’re a healthy addition to the diet, besides being tasty!

Up until the early 20th century, one out of every four trees in the Appalachians, stretching from Maine to Georgia, was an American chestnut (Castanea dentata). This magnificent “redwood of the east” was a keystone species of the ecosystem, because it predictably provided a bounteous harvest of delicious nuts every year. These nuts supported human and wildlife populations. The chestnut wood is beautiful and highly resistant to rot. Unfortunately, the chestnut tree’s bark is highly susceptible to a fungal disease called chestnut blight. When this disease was introduced on imported Chinese chestnut trees, it wiped out virtually the entire population of American chestnut within a few years.

Fortunately, the American Chestnut Foundation is working to develop blight-resistant hybrid trees that are almost entirely American chestnut. Contact them if you know of a surviving tree or would like to grow your own chestnut trees.

The World’s Oldest Clinical Trial Showed the Value of a Vegan Diet!

Clinical trials are a crucial part of the modern scientific method. Yet the earliest recorded clinical trial, which incidentally dealt with food, was conducted around 2600 years ago, in ancient Babylon. There were no scientific journals back then, but we know about the study because it was reported in a book that is revered by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. I’m talking about the Book of Daniel, which is part of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament.

The Book of Daniel is about the Babylonian Captivity, when Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon conquered Judah and Jerusalem and sent the Jews into exile, in roughly the year 600 BC. During this period, it would have been customary to take some of the sons of prominent people from the conquered lands and hold them hostage in court. This explains how Daniel and several other Hebrews ended up in Nebuchadnezzar’s court. They weren’t there voluntarily. Later on, Psalm 137 described this period as follows:

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

One of the biggest problems that Daniel and his fellow captives faced in the court of Nebuchadnezzar was the fact that they would have been expected to eat the food that was being served in court. For devout Jews, of course, this was nothing short of blasphemy. To eat the food at court meant that they would be eating meat from animals that had been sacrificed to pagan gods and drinking wine that had likewise been offered to foreign gods. In other words, by eating the food at court, they would be violating their own religion and taking part in the religion of their captors. To refuse to eat the food at court would thus be a risky act of civil disobedience.

Daniel’s challenge was to figure out some way in which he could get permission for himself and the other Hebrews to avoid offending either God or Nebuchadnezzar. He decided that he and his friends should eat only “food that comes from seeds” (i.e., vegetables and fruit and grains and pulses, such as peas) and drink only water. Thus, they would avoid the meat and wine that were ritually unclean because they had been used in rituals for pagan gods. The overseer in charge of Daniel and his friends was reluctant to let them follow this strict diet. He was afraid it would ruin their health, thus landing him in big trouble. So Daniel suggested a simple experiment. He and his friends would eat plant foods and water for 10 days, and afterward their health would be compared with that of the people consuming meat and wine.

According to the Book of Daniel, after 10 days Daniel and his friends looked healthier than the youths who had been eating the king’s food. It also says that they were “fatter,” but it’s more likely that they would have been thinner than the people who were pigging out on “the king’s dainties.” It’s easy to gain too much weight on a meaty diet, but it’s hard to get fat on a starchy, high-fiber diet. However, that small inaccuracy probably resulted from the fact that the study report was published roughly four centuries after the study itself was completed. As a recent article on this study noted, “Daniel perished, then published.” [1] With tongue firmly in cheek, the article also noted that the methodological weaknesses of the study include “probable selection bias, ascertainment bias, and confounding by divine intervention.”

About 2600 years after Daniel’s experiment, a group of researchers in the United States did roughly the same experiment, this time comparing Daniel’s diet with the standard dietary recommendations of the American Diabetes Association, which allows people to eat controlled portions of “the king’s dainties.” [2] This study differed in several ways from the study reported in the Book of Daniel. The modern study involved people with type 2 diabetes, which is a disease that is known to be linked to obesity and a fatty diet. The subjects were randomly assigned to either the Daniel-type diet or the ADA diet. Also, the trial lasted longer than 10 days, to show improvements in the subjects’ glycosylated hemoglobin levels (HbA1c) and to provide a clear picture of how much weight they lost and how many prescription drugs they could stop taking.

I was not at all surprised to see that a diet like Daniel’s was far more effective than the ADA’s standard recommendations at improving the health of people with type 2 diabetes. What surprised me was that the participants were more successful at sticking to the Daniel-style diet. This success probably stemmed from the fact that although people’s food choices were limited, their portions were not. The ADA dietary recommendations are about portion control, which most people can’t achieve. The Daniel diet lets people eat to their heart’s content, while still losing weight.

Reference List
1. Grimes DA. Clinical research in ancient Babylon: methodologic insights from the book of Daniel. Obstet Gynecol. 1995;86(6):1031–1034.
2. Barnard ND, Cohen J, Jenkins DJ et al. A low-fat vegan diet improves glycemic control and cardiovascular risk factors in a randomized clinical trial in individuals with type 2 diabetes. Diabetes Care. 2006;29(8):1777–1783.

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Clinton’s Heart Problems Really Are a Result of His Diet

Why Won’t More Doctors Tell Their Patients How to Make Themselves Heart-Attack Proof?

Back in 1855, a prominent Baptist preacher told his flock, “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.” Nowadays, lies can travel even more quickly, thanks to the magic of the Internet. On Friday, February 11, 2010, the Associated Press sent around a news item titled “No cure for heart disease, Clinton’s case shows.” According to the article, former President Bill Clinton has just had more surgery to unclog his coronary arteries. He had a quadruple bypass in 2004, and now he has just had surgery to open up one of the bypasses. According to the Associated Press, Clinton’s cardiologist, Dr. Allan Schwartz, told a news conference, “This was not a result of his lifestyle or his diet.” That’s a lie.

Compare what Dr. Schwartz said with the opinion of Dr. William Castelli, who had been chief of the famous Framingham Heart Study. When an interviewer asked how many heart attacks can we wipe out by changes in lifestyle, Dr. Castelli responded, “All of them. There are five billion people on this earth. Four-billion-plus will never get a heart attack. Why can’t we be like them?” Castelli explained that keeping cholesterol low through eating a healthy diet has added benefits: “Studies from China show that if your cholesterol is low, you won’t get breast or colon cancer or diabetes either.”

To make ourselves immune to coronary artery disease, we simply need to keep our total cholesterol below 150 mg/dL. Castelli explained, “Your cells need cholesterol to make cell membranes and hormones. But when your total cholesterol is over 150—or your LDL [“bad”] cholesterol is over 90—the cells have more cholesterol than they can use and no way to get rid of the excess. They can’t break down or oxidize it, so it starts to pile up as a waxy deposit that will eventually choke the cells.”

Population studies have shown that people who eat a low-fat, plant-based diet are “immune” to coronary artery disease. Even when a population with a high risk of heart disease is deprived of their favorite fatty, animal-based foods, as a result of food rationing during wartime, their risk of heart attack plummets. It comes right back after people resume their old eating habits, so the problem is dietary, not genetic. Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn (http://www.heartattackproof.com/) has shown that even patients with advanced coronary artery disease can make themselves “heart-attack proof” by switching to a low fat (<10% of calories), plant-based diet.

Bill Clinton’s heart disease could have ended his life and may still do so. One prominent physician has pointed out that bypass surgery does almost nothing to save lives, and he provoked a controversy by arguing that Clinton’s bypass surgery has had a detrimental effect on the former President’s mental functioning. The bypass surgery itself dislodges bits of crud from the major arteries, which then cause tiny blockages (mini-strokes) in the brain. The decline in mental functioning after bypass surgery is so well recognized in medical circles that they have a slang term for it: “pump head.”

Like the sex scandal that led to his impeachment, Clinton’s heart problems result from his indulgence of unhealthy appetites. Articles about Clinton’s heart problems represent a “teachable moment” to tell the American public what a healthy diet really is. Yet once again, this opportunity is squandered.

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