Pigs are a “mixing vessel” for new strains of flu

The influen­za virus­es that cir­cu­late dur­ing an ordi­nary flu sea­son are bad enough. But every so often, a new and more dan­ger­ous strain of influen­za virus starts cir­cu­lat­ing. The worst strains of flu are hybrids of ordi­nary flu virus­es with strains that don’t nor­mal­ly infect human beings. Some researchers believe that the dan­ger­ous new strains of flu arise when unre­lat­ed strains of flu virus meet and swap genes in domes­tic pigs.

There are two basic ways in which a new strain of the flu can get start­ed. One is through ordi­nary muta­tion. Influen­za virus­es mutate incred­i­bly fast because their genes are in a sin­gle strand of RNA. With­out the “back­up copy” that you find in dou­ble-strand­ed DNA, they can’t use their host cell’s proof­read­ing equip­ment to find and cor­rect copy­ing mis­takes in their genes. Here’s a tech­ni­cal expla­na­tion, for peo­ple who like math. It explains why influen­za virus­es mutate about 300 times faster than poliovirus and even about 10 times as fast as HIV.

Nor­mal­ly, an unsta­ble genome would be a bad thing. That’s because most muta­tions are harm­ful to the virus itself. A virus with an unsta­ble genome would tend to die out unless it repro­duced itself in large num­bers very quick­ly and had the abil­i­ty to recom­bine with relat­ed virus­es. But under those cir­cum­stances, the genet­ic insta­bil­i­ty turns into an advan­tage! It enables the virus to stay one step ahead of the host’s immune sys­tem. We can get the flu again and again because the flu that’s going around this year is a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent from the strain that went around last year. The anti­bod­ies we made last year aren’t a per­fect match for this year’s flu.

The very worst flu strains are the ones that are rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from the ones that had been going around in ear­li­er years. They can infect more peo­ple and cause a more seri­ous ill­ness. These pan­dem­ic flu strains seem to rep­re­sent a com­bi­na­tion of genes from dif­fer­ent strains of flu: some ordi­nary human flu strains plus some unfa­mil­iar type of flu that nor­mal­ly infects wild birds. That’s why there’s been so much hys­te­ria late­ly about “avian flu.” Pigs seem to be a per­fect “mix­ing ves­sel” for new and dead­ly strains of flu, such as the “swine flu” that caused mil­lions of deaths at the end of World War I.

Pre­vent­ing future flu pan­demics would be sim­ple. All we have to do is stop rais­ing domes­tic poul­try and domes­tic swine. At the very least, the use of antivi­ral drugs in agri­cul­ture should be banned. Oth­er­wise, they will no longer be use­ful against flu.

Ask the California State Senate to Require Nutrition Education for MDs

The Cal­i­for­nia State Sen­ate is con­sid­er­ing leg­is­la­tion to require doc­tors to learn about nutri­tion if they want to keep their license to prac­tice med­i­cine. Yes, state leg­is­la­tures can do that! Here’s the text of SB 380. If you live in Cal­i­for­nia, ask your state sen­a­tor to sup­port it. If you don’t live in Cal­i­for­nia but have friends in Cal­i­for­nia, ask them to ask their state sen­a­tor to sup­port it.

In a hear­ing about this leg­is­la­tion, John McDougall, MD, said,

The joke is that a doc­tor and his sec­re­tary know the same about nutri­tion unless she is on a diet, in which case she knows more. … If you cor­rect what’s mak­ing peo­ple sick, they get well.

The Cal­i­for­nia Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion oppos­es the mea­sure. Of course they do. Their rep­re­sen­ta­tive sug­gest­ed that oph­thal­mol­o­gists and ortho­pe­dic sur­geons don’t need to get this train­ing. She’s some­how ignor­ing the fact that our major caus­es of new cas­es of blind­ness and vision loss are dia­betes, mac­u­lar degen­er­a­tion, and cataracts, all of which are strong­ly linked to diet. Oph­thal­mol­o­gists should know this. The joint dis­eases that cause peo­ple to end up get­ting a knee replace­ment are large­ly dietary. Ortho­pe­dic sur­geons should know this. The CMA hasn’t made sure that they learn it. The state gov­ern­ment can demand that doc­tors learn it if they want to keep their license.

It would be in the best inter­est of the peo­ple of Cal­i­for­nia for their doc­tors to get prop­er train­ing in nutri­tion. There­fore, the Cal­i­for­nia leg­is­la­ture should use its pow­er to reg­u­late the med­ical pro­fes­sion to insist that doc­tors get this train­ing. That’s why the state gov­ern­ments were giv­en the pow­er to reg­u­late the med­ical pro­fes­sion to begin with!

Watch the tes­ti­mo­ny here.

Pho­to by JasonD­Great

Dietary Therapy for Ankylosing Spondylitis

When peo­ple get sick, the cause is usu­al­ly their genes or some­thing in the envi­ron­ment or some com­bi­na­tion of the two. For many of our com­mon autoim­mune dis­eases, the cause is prob­a­bly a com­bi­na­tion of genes and diet.

In 2001, a Ger­man med­ical jour­nal pub­lished a case study of a patient who had a dou­ble dose of the gene that increas­es people’s risk of get­ting anky­los­ing spondyli­tis, a form of inflam­ma­to­ry arthri­tis that attacks the spine. He’d been sick for about 10 years and had got­ten lit­tle relief from all the drugs and oth­er treat­ments he’d tried. Nev­er­the­less, he start­ed feel­ing dra­mat­i­cal­ly bet­ter with­in a mat­ter of days after start­ing a pure­ly plant-based diet. When he went back to eat­ing meat again sev­er­al weeks lat­er, his symp­toms flared up again. When he went back to eat­ing a pure­ly plant-based diet, his con­di­tion improved so much that he was able to stop tak­ing most of his med­ica­tion.

Yes, I know that this is just a case study, but its results are con­sis­tent with the results of oth­er kinds of clin­i­cal stud­ies and they make sense in terms of the biol­o­gy. In that con­text, a case study like this, which shows that a sim­ple and gen­er­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial inter­ven­tion can pro­duce such dra­mat­ic improve­ments, should inspire some­one to do a large, well-designed clin­i­cal tri­als. Sad­ly, when I went to www.clinicaltrials.gov to see what kind of research was being done on anky­los­ing spondyli­tis, I found lots and lots of drug stud­ies but no dietary stud­ies. How can researchers jus­ti­fy giv­ing peo­ple pow­er­ful and dan­ger­ous drugs before find­ing out whether the prob­lem can be solved in a mat­ter of days with a sim­ple change in diet?

Pho­to by planetc1

Don’t Eat Fruit Bats, and Avoid Algae Blooms!

The peo­ple with the world’s high­est risk of Lou Gehrig’s dis­ease were the Chamor­ro peo­ple, who were the native peo­ple of Guam. These peo­ple also had a high risk of Alzheimer-like demen­tia and dis­or­ders like parkin­son­ism. The prob­lem didn’t seem to be genet­ic or con­ta­gious, and the dis­eases became less com­mon when the pop­u­la­tion became more Amer­i­can­ized after World War II. These facts sug­gest­ed that the prob­lem result­ed from some­thing that the peo­ple had been eat­ing.

The prime sus­pect in this case is a neu­ro­tox­in called BMAA (beta-methy­lamino-L-ala­nine). It’s sim­i­lar to the amino acid ala­nine that your body uses in mak­ing pro­tein. When BMAA was giv­en to rhe­sus macaques, the result­ing dam­age to the ner­vous sys­tem was sim­i­lar to what was hap­pen­ing to the afflict­ed peo­ple on Guam.

The BMAA orig­i­nal­ly came from cyanobac­te­ria. The cyanobac­te­ria are true bac­te­ria, although they are some­times called blue-green algae. The cycad plant, which was an impor­tant food source for the Chamor­ro peo­ple, has a part­ner­ship (sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship) with cyanobac­te­ria of the genus Nos­toc. The cycads give some sug­ar to the Nos­toc liv­ing on their roots. In return, the Nos­toc con­vert some of the nitro­gen from the atmos­phere into ammo­nia, which the cycad can use as fer­til­iz­er.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the Nos­toc also make some BMAA, which is also absorbed by the cycad. The Chamor­ro peo­ple then were exposed to BMAA when they ate seeds from the cycad plant. They got an even big­ger dose of BMAA when they ate fruit bats, because the BMAA had become con­cen­trat­ed in the bats’ bod­ies. This process of con­cen­tra­tion is called bioac­cu­mu­la­tion.

There are two take-home lessons from this sto­ry. The first is that we may need to be care­ful about human expo­sure to cyanobac­te­ria. All types of cyanobac­te­ria but only cyanobac­te­ria pro­duce BMAA. Human beings could be exposed to BMAA as a result of the tox­ic algae blooms that are becom­ing increas­ing­ly com­mon because of fer­til­iz­er runoff. Peo­ple could become exposed to BMAA by drink­ing or swim­ming in con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed water, such as the water in ponds and reser­voirs. They could also be exposed to BMAA through cyanobac­te­ria in foods or sup­ple­ments made from algae.

The sec­ond les­son is that BMAA, like many oth­er tox­ins, becomes more con­cen­trat­ed as you move up the food chain. Fruit bats con­tained more BMAA than the cycad seeds did. Oth­er tox­ins, such as diox­in and mer­cury, also con­cen­trate as you go up the food chain. It’s anoth­er rea­son why it’s bet­ter for us to eat plants, not ani­mals.

Pho­to by Tam­bako the Jaguar

He Should Have Won the Nobel Prize!

In 1913, a Russ­ian pathol­o­gist named Niko­lai Anitschkow fig­ured out the cause of ath­er­o­scle­ro­sis, which is the under­ly­ing cause of near­ly all heart attacks and most strokes. He even pub­lished his find­ings in the major inter­na­tion­al med­ical jour­nals of his day. He should have won the Nobel Prize. If peo­ple had rec­og­nized the impor­tance of his work, mil­lions of pre­ma­ture deaths could have been avoid­ed.

By the late 19th cen­tu­ry, pathol­o­gists knew that peo­ple who had died of heart attacks and strokes tend­ed to have a lot of softy, fat­ty mate­r­i­al stuck to the inner walls of their arter­ies. This mate­r­i­al even­tu­al­ly hard­ens with the buildup of scar tis­sue and cal­ci­um deposits. The pres­ence of this mate­r­i­al is called ath­er­o­scle­ro­sis, which means hard­en­ing of the arter­ies. The mate­r­i­al itself is called plaque.

In its ear­ly stages, ath­er­o­scle­rot­ic plaque looks and feels like cheese­cake. In 1910, a Ger­man chemist named Adolf Win­daus showed that like real cheese­cake, ath­er­o­scle­rot­ic plaque is rich in cho­les­terol. Because of his work on the chem­istry of sterols, Win­daus won the Nobel Prize in chem­istry in 1928.

As soon as Win­daus pub­lished his find­ings about the cho­les­terol in plaque, Niko­lai Anitschkow start­ed an impor­tant series of exper­i­ments at the Mil­i­tary Med­ical Acad­e­my in St. Peters­burg. Anitschkow dis­solved some puri­fied cho­les­terol in sun­flower oil and fed it to some rab­bits. Con­trol rab­bits got some sun­flower oil with­out added cho­les­terol. The rab­bits that got cho­les­terol in their sun­flower oil got ath­er­o­scle­rot­ic plaque, but the con­trol rab­bits did not. To the naked eye and under a micro­scope, the plaque from rab­bit arter­ies looked a lot like the plaque from human arter­ies.

Anitschkow and his cowork­ers dis­cov­ered a lot of impor­tant things about ath­er­o­scle­ro­sis in those ear­ly exper­i­ments. As cho­les­terol researcher Jon Gof­man argued,

If the full sig­nif­i­cance of his find­ings had been appre­ci­at­ed at the time, we might have saved more than 30 years in the long strug­gle to set­tle the ‘cho­les­terol con­tro­ver­sy’ and Anitschkow might have won a Nobel Prize. Instead, his find­ings were large­ly reject­ed or at least not fol­lowed up. Seri­ous research on the role of cho­les­terol in human ath­er­o­scle­ro­sis did not real­ly get under­way until the 1940s.

Why were Anitschkow’s find­ings ignored? Because they couldn’t be repeat­ed in dogs. As a result, many sci­en­tists assumed that the find­ings wouldn’t apply to human beings, either. That’s an idi­ot­ic assump­tion, because ath­er­o­scle­ro­sis is rare in dogs, which are nat­ur­al car­ni­vores. Anitschkow guessed cor­rect­ly that dogs and oth­er car­ni­vores are good at excret­ing excess cho­les­terol. Human beings and rab­bits are not. Trag­i­cal­ly, no one lis­tened, prob­a­bly because they’d rather eat meat than rab­bit food.

My Cholesterol Is Too Low for the Heart Attack Risk Calculator!

I tried to use the Nation­al Cho­les­terol Edu­ca­tion Program’s Risk Assess­ment Tool for Esti­mat­ing Your 10-Year Risk of Hav­ing a Heart Attack. I entered my data on the form, and I got back an error mes­sage, telling me to enter a total cho­les­terol val­ue of 130 or greater! Accord­ing to the cal­cu­la­tor, even if my cho­les­terol went up to 130 mg/dL, I’d still have less than a 1% chance of hav­ing a heart attack with­in the next 10 years.

(Note: here’s a live ver­sion of the tool, which does not give an error mes­sage: https://www.cardiosmart.org/healthwise/calc/006/calc006)

If I ran the Nation­al Cho­les­terol Edu­ca­tion Pro­gram, I’d real­ly edu­cate peo­ple about cho­les­terol. I’d tell them the sim­ple truth: that when you keep your total cho­les­terol at less than 150 mg/dL, coro­nary artery dis­ease ceas­es to exist. Near­ly every­one can eas­i­ly achieve that goal by eat­ing a low-fat (<10% of calo­ries), plant-based diet.

Instead, the NCEP tells peo­ple that a total cho­les­terol lev­el of  up to 200 mg/dL is “desir­able.” Lots of peo­ple with this “desir­able” cho­les­terol lev­el are dying of heart attacks, which is why many peo­ple, includ­ing many doc­tors, are con­fused.Pho­to by win­nifredx­oxo

Accidentally Kosher for Passover!

Back when I was in high school, a friend of mine from an obser­vant Jew­ish fam­i­ly told me that her fam­i­ly often ate in veg­e­tar­i­an restau­rants. She explained that most of the Jew­ish dietary laws relat­ed to meat. If you ate in a restau­rant that nev­er served any meat prod­ucts, you would auto­mat­i­cal­ly be observ­ing most of the rules.

The excep­tion, of course, is Passover. Dur­ing Passover, Jews aren’t sup­posed to eat yeast-raised bread. This rule doesn’t just apply to wheat. It applies to four oth­er grains as well: bar­ley, rye, spelt, and oats. If any of these grains is allowed to sit in water for longer than 18 min­utes, it becomes chometz. It’s against Jew­ish dietary law to eat, own, or ben­e­fit from chometz at any time dur­ing Passover.

Of course, peo­ple with celi­ac dis­ease can’t eat wheat, bar­ley, rye, or spelt—even if they haven’t become chometz—at any time of year. In oth­er words, prod­ucts that are gluten-free and don’t con­tain oats are auto­mat­i­cal­ly nev­er chometz.

Ashke­nazi Jews are also sup­posed to refrain from eat­ing kit­niy­ot dur­ing Passover. Kit­niy­ot con­sists of grains and puls­es (such as corn, rice, beans, lentils, peas, and pos­si­bly peanuts) that could be con­fused with chometz. Still, a gluten-free veg­an cook­book would be a good place to look for good recipes to use dur­ing Passover. Lots of those recipes are acci­den­tal­ly Kosher for Passover!

Pho­to by Cen­ter for Jew­ish His­to­ry, NYC

Why Gorillas, Why Not Chimpanzees?

Many peo­ple have asked me, why do you ask where goril­las get their pro­tein, when our bod­ies and our body chem­istry more close­ly resem­ble those of chim­panzees? My answer is that goril­las are much big­ger and more pow­er­ful than chim­panzees. Last night, I saw a muse­um exhib­it that com­pared a goril­la skull to a chim­panzee skull and a human skull. (They might have been mod­els. It was hard to tell.) The goril­la skull was huge! The chim­panzee skull was about the same size as a human skull.

The oth­er rea­son is that goril­las eat a much more strict­ly plant-based diet. Chim­panzees hunt once in a while, and they often eat their kill. Even so, they still eat a lot less meat than just about any human pop­u­la­tion. Nev­er­the­less, I was afraid that the fact they eat a lit­tle bit of meat now and then would mud­dy the waters.

My point is this. Most of the real­ly big and pow­er­ful land ani­mals got big and pow­er­ful by eat­ing plants. They don’t wor­ry about get­ting a pro­tein defi­cien­cy on a plant-based diet, and nei­ther should you.

 

(Image cour­tesy of Mahla­ti­ni Lux­u­ry Safari, https://www.mahlatini.com/gorilla-trekking-safaris/)

Bourbon and potato chips are vegan!

My Web site and blog are about healthy food. I want peo­ple to know what sci­ence real­ly says about how diet affects human health. For exam­ple, we know that eat­ing ani­mal-based foods rais­es the risk of a whole host of dis­eases, includ­ing heart dis­ease, many can­cers, and autoim­mune dis­eases. The less ani­mal-based food you eat, the safer you can be from those dis­eases. So the health-opti­miz­ing diet for human beings would be free from ani­mal prod­ucts. It could there­fore be clas­si­fied as veg­an. Although all healthy foods are veg­an, not all veg­an foods are healthy. For exam­ple, no one would con­sid­er bour­bon and pota­to chips to be the basis for a healthy diet.

The first veg­e­tar­i­ans I met were veg­e­tar­i­an for reli­gious rea­sons. They includ­ed some Hin­du peo­ple who had been born in India and some Sev­enth-Day Adven­tists from the USA. I’ve also known obser­vant Jews who would eat in veg­e­tar­i­an restau­rants because every­thing that’s veg­e­tar­i­an is auto­mat­i­cal­ly Kosher. I also know a lot of peo­ple who refuse for moral rea­sons to eat any prod­ucts that come from ani­mals. All of the peo­ple I’ve just described can eat at my house with­out vio­lat­ing any of their dietary laws. Since I’m aller­gic to wheat, every­thing that I cook is even kosher for Passover. How­ev­er, not every­thing that pass­es muster in their dietary laws is good for them.

To be tru­ly health-opti­miz­ing for the aver­age per­son, a diet also has to be low in fat (<10% of calo­ries) and high in fiber. Some of the foods that con­tain no ani­mal prod­ucts are nev­er­the­less high in fat or low in fiber. A high-fat, low-fiber veg­an diet could pro­mote ath­er­o­scle­ro­sis, even though it doesn’t con­tain any cho­les­terol. That’s why even veg­ans occa­sion­al­ly die of heart attacks.

When I was grow­ing up, I was taught in school that the meat group (which includes eggs and fish) and the dairy group (which includes all milk prod­ucts) are an essen­tial part of a bal­anced diet for human beings. How­ev­er, when I grew up and start­ed read­ing nutri­tion and med­ical text­books and sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals, I found strong evi­dence that those foods are dan­ger­ous and unnec­es­sary. So far, I haven’t found any evi­dence that any human beings would real­ly ben­e­fit from adding ani­mal-based foods to an oth­er­wise healthy plant-based diet. I found plen­ty of evi­dence that cats need cer­tain nutri­ents that occur only in ani­mals, and are not pro­duced by plants or bac­te­ria. How­ev­er, I’ve seen no such evi­dence for human nutri­tion. If I find it, I will report it. Then, the deci­sion of whether to eat those foods will be a moral deci­sion, not a health deci­sion.

Quick, but temporary weight loss! This time from France!

I just heard about a “new” diet: the Dukan diet. It’s from France! It promis­es four steps to per­ma­nent weight loss! It promis­es that peo­ple will lose weight while eat­ing as much as they like! The prob­lem is that this “new” diet isn’t real­ly new. It’s just South Beach with a French accent. The quick results from the first phase aren’t from fat loss. Nor will your weight prob­lem be per­ma­nent­ly cured by the end of the pro­gram, regard­less of what Dr. Dukan says. It’s just more false hope for des­per­ate peo­ple.

Like many fad diets, the Dukan diet starts with a low-carb phase. As if by mag­ic, this phase caus­es peo­ple to lose sev­er­al pounds very quick­ly. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the weight that peo­ple lose so quick­ly does not rep­re­sent fat. Instead, it rep­re­sents the loss of the body’s glyco­gen stores. Glyco­gen is a starch that is stored in the liv­er and mus­cles. When the body needs quick ener­gy, the glyco­gen is bro­ken down into glu­cose, which is a sug­ar that is the body’s favorite fuel.

Like oth­er car­bo­hy­drates, glyco­gen pro­vides about 4 calo­ries per gram of dry weight. How­ev­er, the glyco­gen in the body isn’t dry. Each gram of glyco­gen absorbs about 2.7 grams of water. As a result, each gram of wet glyco­gen in the body rep­re­sents rough­ly 1 calo­rie of stored ener­gy. If you sud­den­ly deprive your­self of car­bo­hy­drates, your body will run through its glyco­gen stores very quick­ly, releas­ing water that will leave the body through the kid­neys. You would have to burn up almost 9 times as many calo­ries to lose that much weight from fat.

The rapid weight loss that results from cut­ting out car­bo­hy­drates may be thrilling to the frus­trat­ed dieter, but it is mean­ing­less. Nobody is over­weight from hav­ing too much glyco­gen, and your body will replace that glyco­gen and water as soon as it can. What peo­ple real­ly want to lose is fat. Besides, los­ing your glyco­gen can make you feel crum­my. When marathon­ers “hit the wall,” it’s typ­i­cal­ly because they’re run out of glyco­gen.

So the first phase of the Dukan diet or the South Beach Diet will cause a quick but tem­po­rary and mean­ing­less weight loss that could end up zap­ping your ener­gy. If the Dukan diet even­tu­al­ly helps you lose fat, it does so by mak­ing your body think that you are starv­ing or seri­ous­ly ill. Dur­ing a sud­den fast, the body’s sup­ply of car­bo­hy­drates is cut off. The body has to rely on its fat stores and the pro­teins in its tis­sues instead. A low-carb diet mim­ics this con­di­tion. The body may respond to this emer­gency by sup­press­ing the appetite. The per­son may then lose weight the old-fash­ioned way, by tak­ing in few­er calo­ries than he or she burns up.

The Dukan diet is based on a lie: that peo­ple get fat from eat­ing a high-carb diet. In real­i­ty, fat is fat­ten­ing, and starch­es are slim­ming. That’s because starch, like glyco­gen, holds water. It’s actu­al­ly hard to fat­ten your­self on starch­es. For exam­ple, con­sid­er what hap­pened when the head of the Wash­ing­ton State Pota­to Com­mis­sion went on an all-pota­to diet to protest the exclu­sion of pota­toes from the fed­er­al Women, Infants, and Chil­dren (WIC) pro­gram. He lost 21 pounds in 60 days, even though he was eat­ing about 20 pota­toes per day. He also cut his total cho­les­terol by over a third, and low­ered his blood sug­ar. In oth­er words, he also improved his health.

A starchy diet works on both sides of the weight loss equa­tion. You end up eat­ing few­er calo­ries, because the starchy foods are so bulky. Boiled starch­es often pro­vide only 1 calo­rie per gram, where­as fat pro­vides 9 calo­ries per gram. You also end up burn­ing more calo­ries on a low-fat, high-carb diet, because you become much more sen­si­tive to insulin. If you still man­age to have a few calo­ries left over, it’s hard for your body to store them as fat. You’d lose about 30% of the calo­ries in the con­ver­sion process, so your body just gen­er­al­ly revs up your metab­o­lism to burn off the excess. You may end up doing more activ­i­ty, or sim­ply gen­er­at­ing more body heat.

For­get Dukan’s false promis­es. The only proven way to achieve healthy, per­ma­nent weight loss is to switch to a low-fat, high-fiber, high-car­bo­hy­drate diet. That’s because it’s the kind of diet that is appro­pri­ate to the human body. If you sim­ply train your­self to eat­ing the right kinds of food, you can eat as much as you like and still stay slim.