Note: before anyone pooh-poohs this article for being in a blog mostly about weather and climate, note the description on the masthead. Note also that I have recently experienced cancer in my family as I’m sure many readers have at some time, therefore it is relevant to me, and may be helpful to others, and that’s all that matters. – Anthony
Guest post by David Archibald
Before starting out in climate science in 2006, my main hobby was cancer research. To that end, I had co-invented a cancer drug with two professors from Purdue University, Professor Jim Morre and his wife Professor Dorothy Morre. I went on to lodge a patent on a benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) drug myself. I still operate in that space. Early in that journey, I was given the draft manuscript of a book on how isoflavones from soy and other legumes modulate the human female hormone system.
That was in 1998. The manuscript had been written by Dr Graham Kelly who had founded a company to commercialise isoflavone supplementation in men and women. Dr Kelly’s journey in cancer research started in the 1980s when a friend with bowel cancer asked him to look into the science of it. Dr Kelly was intrigued by the epidemiological differences in cancer rates between populations. For example, Japanese who migrate to the US go to the US breast cancer rate in a generation. The US breast cancer rate is five times the Japanese breast cancer rate. The difference in cancer rate is not genetic, it is obviously dietary. So what is the difference in diet that is causing the difference in cancer incidence? A big difference is isoflavone consumption. Amongst the Japanese, it is an average of 40 mg per day. The US average is 3 mg per day.
In Western countries, breast cancer and prostate cancer have the same incidence. In women, 11% get diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime and 5% die of it. In men, 11% get diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime and 5% die of it. There are very big epidemiological differences in prostate cancer rates. As the following graph shows, the Vietnamese prostate cancer rate is one fortieth of the Western prostate cancer rate:
Defeating the scourge of a lot of common cancers is as simple as changing your diet. It is a bit like Vitamin C. If you don’t get any Vitamin C in your diet, you die of scurvy within three years. Pigs and dogs make their own Vitamin C, and presumably some precursor ape to humans had the ability to make it. Humans must have lost the ability for an evolutionary advantage. There are probably a large number of other plant molecules which we evolved to rely upon in our diet. We might not die in the near term if we don’t get them in our diet, but we suffer an increased incidence of degenerative diseases if we don’t. With respect to the dietary components that might cause the low Vietnamese prostate cancer rate, the national dish of Vietnam is called pho. It is a bowl of noodles and meat with three side dishes – bean sprouts, chillis and mint. The anticancer effect would be the result of synergistic blocking of the tNOX molecule on the external membrane of cancer cells by sulforaphane from the bean sprouts with capsaicin from the chilli peppers, stopping the overproduction of anti-apoptotic proteins and allowing the death receptors to trigger the apoptotic cascade of the caspases.
Back to Dr Kelly’s book, “Hormones with Harmony”. It is 70,000 words and goes into highly readable detail on how the daughter metabolites of isoflavones become human hormones in the body. They then become very useful in evening out the peaks and troughs of the body’s estrogenic hormones: estradiol, estrone and estriol. The book goes into detail on how the plant-derived hormones are beneficial in pms, mastalgia, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, uterine cancer, ovarian cancer, menopausal symptoms, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, cataracts, senile dementia and breast cancer. Without being overly technical, it does not talk down to its readers. Earlier this year, I undertook to get it published and it is now available on Kindle for $5 per copy. I do recommend it.
Further to the subject of prostate cancer, there are a number of plant molecules that have an effect on it and BPH. All cancers have tNOX molecules on their external membranes. tNOX is the tumour variant of cNOX, or normal constituent NOX. No plant molecules bind to cNOX but a number bind to tNOX. tNOX has two binding sites. If both are bound to simultaneously, the effect is synergistic. For example, the combination of sulforaphane with capsaicin has twenty times the effect of sulforaphane alone. Another example of synergism is curcumin from turmeric with piperine from black pepper.
David Archibald
December 2012
Jeff L says:
December 12, 2012 at 10:25 am
I suspect that high LDL cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, but it is an effect of whatever is the real cause of heart disease. Trying to control the effect vs. the cause is not especially productive.
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my doctor recently made the same observation.
A friend of mine is a western trained oncologist who now practices in Asia, further is now a highly respected and “well known”.
She has studied the high rate of nose and throat cancers, stomach cancers and bowel cancers prevalent in Asia compared to western countries.
One of her theories is that long time open cooking on woks with suspiciously carcinogenic Asian cooking sauces has an impact on professional restaurant cooks. A high rate of nose cancer patients seem to come from the cook profession or those whose house duties consist of a large percentage of the day over the wok.
She also holds to the theory, as D.A. has commented on above. Too much white rice maybe a possible influence on the high rate of stomach and bowel cancers among Asians (In Asia).
She also comments that you need to bear in mind that the life expectancy rates are much lower in S.E.Asia and this has an impact on the cancer incident figures.
@johanna:”But there are uncountable competing theories out there, and none of them passes the tests of scientific rigour that we require of – oh, I don’t know – climate science.”
Well, one of them does – it’s called the Kreb’s cycle, it’s absolutely basic biology, but despite this, even otherwise smart doctors gloss over it and buy into the low-fat/low-calorie dogma of the USDA. Insulin promotes fat accumulation. Not in the “CO2 produces warming in the laboratory” sense, but in the “our sun is responsible for daylight” sense. There may be other minor actors in the fat accumulation game, but they’re illiputians compared to insulin.
Insulin is excreted in response to blood sugar. Not in the “H2O amplifies the small warming effect of CO2” sense, but in the “we can measure gravity by repeatable experiments” sense. As complex as the human body is, we can directly measure this effect in action.
Blood sugar is raised by the consumption of starches and sugars. Again, not in the “record low ice extent in the arctic means we’re all going to drown” sense, but in the “there is a thing called the maximum speed of light, and it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law” sense. They even have a thing called a “glucose tolerance test” that you can administer to a human (although, frankly, now that I know what kind of effect that has on the body, I wouldn’t let anyone do that to me).
Now, you’re right, there are a *bunch* of dietary zealots out there based on the worst observational studies and misinterpretation imaginable (http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/). Some people think eating “mostly plants” is the way to go. Others still just believe it is calories in/calories out (in the same sense that human emitted CO2 must simply *add* to global averages, since every other source and sink out there is in perfect balance and will not react in any way). Others are positive that whole grains and organic fruit are panaceas. However, when it comes to the basic, repeatable, literally-not-disputed-even-by-these-other-diet-zealots science, the real thing to avoid is starches and sugars. There are certainly minor tweaks to help after that, including things already mentioned about omega3/6 ratios, and other small bits. But the biggest factor? The great big flaming ball in the sky that the AGW proponents ignore? Carbohydrate.
I eat Indian curry regularly which has tumeric and chili. Would be interested to see the condition incidence for the Indian sub-continent (incontinent!). 8% of the population will die of Introns. More than cancer and accidents. (mike Lynch KITP 1/2010). Also
Creating stem cells and predicting who will die of prostate cancer (free, stream on demand-Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics)
http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/bblunch/levine2
Don’t forget MARMITE!!!!!!!!!
@Logan in AZ:
Thanks! I’ll be looking…
FWIW, for decades I was plagued by ‘cold sores’. (Mouth sores from a virus). I now basically never get them, due to generally keeping my Vit-C level up.
WHEN I do get one (usually after letting the Vit-C drop and then doing something very stressful that raises vit-C demand); I’ve now got a 100% rapid cure method. I dampen a vit-C pill and apply it directly to the (incipient) sore; while taking 10 Grams / day orally. At whatever state it has reached (from ‘little starting to hurt knot under the skin’ to full on sore) it immediately starts to reverse. Inside a couple of days the whole thing is over (with at most a scab / healing not hurting – if I let it get to the large sore stage… That hasn’t happened in years 😉
I’ve also recommended this to others who have had the same result, so it’s not idiosyncratic to me.
I’d be willing to bet it generalizes to other viruses, but I’ve not tested it.
@Gamecock:
Depends a bit on your personal ‘gut length’. I have a long one, so digest plants better. A friend had a very short one and what came out was a lot like what went in (expecially corn… he didn’t chew much either 😉
But generally, yes, we’re evolved toward cooked food. We’ll still get some out of the raw stuff (as we started from that pole) but not enough for full time…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/glires-and-euarchontoglires/
per Pho?: look up thread. It’s a very tasty Vietnamese soup / stew dish.
@John:
It’s not the level of steak and beef, or there would have been cancer “hot spots” of long standing in the entire Mid-West to Texas prior to 1920…
There’s a lot of traditional ‘farm families’ with high meat consumption and low cancer rates. It’s something in the processed packaged lifestyle that does it. (Which might well be mitigated with lower meat consumption, I don’t know.)
BTW, I’m not coming at this from any ‘Food Bigot’ POV. 1/2 the family eats vegetarian and I spent about 2 years cooking ‘mostly vegetarian’ for all of us. Even the non-vegetarian 1/2 is presently on a ‘modest meat’ diet with mostly chicken and fish as the ‘meat’…
Over the years I’ve joined various friend on various odd diets. From “all meat all the time” to “high carbs” to “no carbs” to … Mostly nothing much changed, though I did lose some weight on the “all meat all the time” diet (even though it was surprisingly hard to do… I really like my mashed potatoes and peas 😉 and home made bread… with butter…
Then again, I seem to be more omnivorous than most of them were…
@Mfo:
“Without onions there would be cooking, but no cuisine…”
One of the other things hard to live without…
Yes, the alliums as a group are good. Oddly, they are poisonous to many kinds of animals. We share some ability with rabbits (that are more closely related to us than are cows and horses, dogs and cats) who can also eat onions. (Mine like to nibble them in the garden 😉
They are also somewhat good at killing off various kinds of pests and fungals. Eat your alliums!
@Gail Combs :
Your link didn’t work… just paste in the URL and it’s easier, if not as fancy 😉
Love to make soup with the ‘odds and ends’… 😉
@WetMan:
In Okinawa, the young generation that eats a more western style is getting western style disease profiles. Despite living right next to the older generation that still eats the traditional way. Despite many other factors NOT changing…
Food matters. (Though maybe not as much as the fanatics think 😉
@Michael Tremblay :
YES!
There’s a ‘colon cancer gene’ that makes you more likely to get it, BUT, if you load up on ‘bulk’ and raw / lightly cooked vegetables, the rate drops a lot. So a predisposition can be offset with some changes.
There is ZERO doubt about that one. Diet directly changes the environment of the gut to produce more or less of the toxic things that cause cancerous changes and the lack of bulk slows down the rate of processing such that things “plug up” and the concentration rises fast. Lots of bulk, things move faster and the toxins are more dilute; cancer rates drop.
I know, not exactly like the ‘food to blood’, but you didn’t limit your ‘food does not reduce’ to that 😉
(BTW, there’s a pretty good list of foods that clearly cause higher cancer rates. Just leaving them out reduces cancer… Or, like nitrosomines from bacon, just drink a glass of milk with it and they get neutralized 😉
Each person is a unique genetic mix and we all react to our environment differently.
(My clan, for example, needs our bulk and veggies, but also seems completely unharmed by any amount of fats, meats, smoked foods, etc. etc… Guy next door over might well keel over dead from what I eat. Had a friend that did poorly on veggies, but could spend all day on mostly meat… )
@Steve P.:
There was a guy, stuck on a raft at sea, nearly starved for something like months. Finally drifted into S. America (he came from the other side of the Atlantic). His metabolism had shifted and he never could eat as much again… but ended up living longer.
@ColdOldMan:
Soya does contain some phyto-estrogens that act like estrogen to animals. So there’s a theoretical reason why it might have an effect.
With that said, I have no idea if it has any impact on sexual orientation development.
(Personally, I’d think the plasticizers that have shown strong estrogenic impact to be more important..)
@Gunga Din:
There’s some of that (cure heart disease, you get more cancer from old age). BUT you have expected rates by age group, so you can see if the time of onset is shifting
@Jeez:
Food effects on health and cancer are real. You may not like the way it was presented, but it isn’t a mystery. In many cases it starts with identifying a food – correlation, then moves on to eventually finding the exact chemical and pathway.
If you stop at the first step, or prevent that first step, you never get to the rest of the process.
For example, phyto-estrogens. Absolutely have an effect. Asian women were using tofu long before the rest of us “scientifically” figured out what a phtyo-estrogen was…
krischel says:
December 12, 2012 at 6:06 pm
…. Insulin promotes fat accumulation…..
___________________________________
Very much so.
Sugars and starches are bad news, otherwise a variety of meats and veggies, preferably fresh makes the most sense.
I also think different people react differently to different foods. Probably depends on how much Neanderthal DNA we have.
@Les Francis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide#Occurrence_in_food_and_associated_health_risks
Polyunsaturated oils, in particular, make a lot of acrylamide on prolonged or high heating.
That’s why it’s best to use polyunsaturated oils for things like mayonnaise and salad oil while shifting to saturated fats or mono-unsaturated if you must for frying and high temperatures.
This is well known… in some parts of the world (Europe?) there are even mandated maximum hours to use oil in deep fryers.
(For the “food science is bunkum” folks, yes, it’s been lab tested with dead rats from cancer and everything…)
So spending all day working over a ‘hot wok’ is likely to give a high dose of acrylamide right up the old snoot…
That’s why some recipes particularly call out the oil to use ( like peanut oil) in addition to the flavor aspect 😉
It isn’t enough to say “fat is fat”. Each one is highly different in health effect, flavor, and best use.
( I use Palm Oil as a vegetarian shortening and Lard as the non-vegetarian one. I save bacon grease for various kinds of cooking due to the high heat resistance (and flavor). Olive oil for most ‘flavored’ sauté, butter for those that benefit, and a 50/50 butter / Olive Oil mix for many thing 😉 Safflower is next in line for most ‘general purpose’ uses (the high mon-unsaturated variation). Then Canola for the more generic needs. No soy oil. No corn oil. I’ve tried Grape Seed oil and it’s great, but a bit expensive. Oh, and coconut oil in baking. It makes breads that are delicious 😉
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/bread-potato-flour-millet-amaranth/
FWIW, I do occasionally buy soy or corn oil. When I’m rushed or just need something and can’t get to the store with Safflower oil. But it is NOT used in frying… In otherwords, this is a preference and optimizing thing, not a ‘must do’ thing…
This is based on the well understood formation of acrylamide and the well understood omega-3 / omega-6 effect on inflammation. You want a high “smoke point” oil for high temperature cooking and less omega-6 lower inflammation, for health. Pretty simple. Understood to the level of individual chemical compounds and hormones / metabolic pathways. No voodoo involved. No speculation.
@Krischel:
I keep hearing folks say that about carbohydrates in general. Yet my experience is contrary.
A friend was diagnosed hypoglycemic some decades back. I decided to see if I could experiment on me to help him. (The was before hypoglycemia was ‘popular’ and before the internet… yes, that old…)
I ‘could eat anything’ without issues, so figured it was ‘safe’.
It took me many months, and some very extreme effort, but I managed to induce hypoglycemic like effects. (Didn’t have a doctor confirm, so have to say ‘like’…) Mostly eating “all carbs all the time and nothing else” did it; but it took weeks.
Then discovered that my strong blood sugar swings did NOT just go away as soon as I ate a steak and that pasta was still ‘an issue’ the next day…
OK…
Long story short, after about a week of more meat and veggies, I was back closer to normal. After a month, I was fine. Then I tried some more “sugar shocks” and nothing happened (again! Yay!)…
My conclusion? For any reasonably modest period of time, a load of carbs is not hard to deal with for a relatively normal metabolism, well fed on normal foods. IFF highly excessive for a long time, it can become an issue (but can reverse). For some individuals with genetic susceptibility, “‘excessive for a long time” can be much shorter than for me.
So not carbs, per se, but amount of carbs for your metabolism and history.
For population studies, there may well be enough such sensitive people to show a ‘significant result’ from carbs, but be careful about generalizing that to all people all the time…
BTW, I don’t know what was the “active or causal” item in the hypoglycemic response. Did I deplete some B-Vitamin or push the liver to some extreme or shift gut bacteria or… ??? Who knows. But it was reversed with adding back animal protein and fats along with more fibre / bulk from whole veggies. (Yet that doesn’t mean ‘carbs are evil’ and only eat meat, fats, veggies either… my typical “healthy” diet has a plate that is 1/3 each “Protein, Veggy, Carb”. Learned the ‘meal plan’ as a kid at home. Chicken / mashed / peas, or fish / rice / parsnips, or Chili Beans / Crackers / Corn-on-the-cob, or… It has worked well for at least 100 years in my family that I know of. )
@Gail Combs:
Ah, that would explain why my morning “Cinnamon Toast” works so well… (Home made bread, toasted, real butter – to soak ;-), sprinkled with mix of about 1/4 cinnamon 3/4 sugar to saturation… that is, once it stops soaking butter out of the toast, stop adding more 😉
@johnnythelowery:
OK, I’m remember Marmite… (Now what?)…
(Do like curry… haven’t made it in a while… hmmm…. Dinner Time! Ding Ding!!)
By today’s standards, my Dad ate crap. For 90 years.
@Gail Combs:
Got me thinking… maybe it’s the WAY we eat our carbs…. Mine are typically not refined, but inside rice, potatoes, or pasta. Only sugar used is in tea, coffee, or on that toast… Unlike the spouse, I don’t eat much sweets, deserts, or ‘breakfast cereal’ (other than cooked like oats that does get a spoon of sugar, but in a load of whole grain…)
Basically, I don’t get much of a ‘sugar pulse’ as it’s always being slowed down by the context…
so not much insulin overshoot / rebound…
Hmmm…. Going to think about that over a nice lentil and potato curry…
When receiving dietary advice I take everything I read with a pinch of salt! Then I follow my grandmothers advice,” A little bit of what you fancy does you good”. Hardly scientific, but I have never met anyone who cannot prescribe a miracle cure for both my arthritis and asthma within minutes of meeting me. Forgive my skepticism, but I feel that there are too many forks in the dietary path to make one direction preferable to another. At the end of them all is a wooden box. I just want to get to it just when my fuel runs out and not a minute before.
Ivor Ward
Cancer is a horrible thing.
I would have done anything to help my friend save his daughter who passed from such this past weekend.
She was my friend, and is dearly missed, and would always put a smile on anyone’s face who met her!
http://www.yourobserver.com/news/east-county/Front-Page/1212201223593/Jayne-Keys-enjoyed-her-last-wish-to-play-in-the-sn
E.M.Smith says:
December 12, 2012 at 6:14 pm
@Gunga Din:
There’s some of that (cure heart disease, you get more cancer from old age). BUT you have expected rates by age group, so you can see if the time of onset is shifting
===============================================================
Thanks for responding to me (and everybody else!). I know you didn’t write the post but then “age standardized” probably relates to age of onset?
In Asia they eat fermented soy a lot more than unfermented. Historically that was due to a lack of refrigeration. If their diet changes as refrigeration becomes common it will be interesting to see if any changes in cancer.
As to the GMO influence on us we are all lab rats for Monsanto if we eat it. Avoiding it is hard but can be done. The “research” Monsanto does is worse than anything I’ve seen. For example in their RBGH research they claimed that “any residuals were destroyed at pasturization temperatures” but didn’t mention that they kept it at that temp for 30 minutes! That is like baking a turkey for 2 weeks and claiming there is no salmonela.
You may want to look into reshi mushroom extract as well as curcumin as very effective anti-cancer compounds. Pubmed has lots of research on them available.
[sorry – can’t promote that here – mod]
@Gunga Din:
http://www.michaelwosnick.com/category/age-standardized-cancer-rates/
has a comment that goes over why ‘age standardized’ is important.
As a quick hypothetical example:
By about 80, a male is pretty much guaranteed to have prostate cancer in some stage (modulo a few odd folks who don’t). So if you just took an old folks home, and said “A recent sample in Miami found 78% of men had prostate cancer.” it would be meaningless. Similarly, if you look at a kindergarten and find 100% of males have no such cancer, it doesn’t say much.
Now let say you pick a population, like NYC, and make a %/year-of-age graph. Then look at Tokyo and make the same graph. IF they are offset, the odds are there’s a causal factor. You can say the “age adjusted rate for Tokyo is 5% lower than for NYC” by taking (for example) the band of 50 to 60 year olds and subtracting the Tokyo number from the NYC number and finding 5% as the residual.
(Really you would need bias by number of individuals in each year of age band, but you get the idea).
Do that enough, you get the “standard” (or baseline) rate for each age group. Now any given location can be compared to any other by “age adjusting” via comparing their rates in any given age group to the “standard / baseline” .
That’s slightly different from ‘age of onset’, but more correct. For things like deafness, age of onset can be more enlightening just because it’s hard to adjust for “degree”. Essentially, it uses a threshold of ‘first time strong enough to notice’ to make up for “never die from it and can’t tell how much one guy differs from another very well” (especially in old data pre-testing machines). So you can easily spot that in an industrial society, ‘age of onset’ of deafness was about 40-something (prior to ear protection) while in hunter gatherers it was as a very old man, or never. (Generally). You might even notice ‘nodal points’ with a 4 to 5 year old mode and a 50 to 60 year mode and eventually discover measles related deafness and noise related deafness…
Does that help?
@TRM:
GMO scares the heck out of me. (Largely because I do know a lot about biology and genetics.) There is no way on this earth that Monsanto has done enough testing or has a clue what the long term effect on health can be. From epigenetic issues to the fact that they use “lock on” codons for the inserted genes (and that bacteria can pick up genes from what they eat and move them around, look up plasmids, so potentially get end up with a locked on toxin making gene…) to the way genes are “splattered” randomly into the genome (locking on ‘whatever’ is nearby? or breaking ‘whatever’ they got shoved into? )
It’s spinning the biological chemical factory wheel and hoping you don’t make something very very bad… It is not as described / advertised… ( That is, it is not a well understood well controlled known insertion and activation of just the desired gene… It’s a virus particle gene used to force insertion of a crowbar lock on control sequence with a chunk of following DNA into “whatever” and “where ever” then grow out the few cells that didn’t outright die and hope the insertion shot didn’t damage anything important…)
As “genes move”, it also means that those genes will NOT stay just in the target species / variety.
So take a ‘BT Corn”. It has genes to make the BT Toxin in each and every cell. You can’t wash it off. You eat it. Some gut bacteria, being none too careful (as bacteria are…) pick up a copy of that gene and start using it. Now you get an ongoing and potentially growing gut concentration of BT toxin. Nobody knows what that will do.
(No, it won’t happen often. Maybe only 1 in a million. Now take a few Billion people… then the bug starts to spread from animal to animal or person to person… )
I’ll stop now before I get too wound up on this. ( FWIW, I had upper division genetics at University, at an Ag school. I’m from “Farm Country” and very pro-farmer. GMO is NOT farmer friendly. It’s Monsanto friendly. I haven’t even touched on the ways Monsanto attacks farmers… Nor am I a Luddite. I think the tech has a lot of potential, and done carefully could be highly beneficial. But force feeding every farm animal and person on the planet toxins built into the food cell wall is not one of them.)
At least in California you can avoid GMO if you buy ‘organic’ labeled food. I’d rather be able to buy food labeled “Non-GMO” (as I see no reason to not use synthetic fertilizers and some classes of pesticides) but Monsanto bought the laws that say we are forbidden to label food “Non-GMO”… (though there are efforts to change that. Don’t know if they have gotten anywhere).
Thanks for running the topic, Anthony. Much appreciated. And much needed.
i think boiling or cooking denatures dna, amirite?
stomach acid has a pH as low as 1.5, which also denatures dna, amirite?
unless somebody is mainlining corn, i’m not seeing a big threat.
on the other hand, starvation is serious, so there’s a good argument for increasing food supply, amirite?
Anthony, I wish you and your family the best.
The Paleo or primal lifestyle documented at MarksDailyApple.com (not me) might help you and yours.
Did you hear about Mad Salad Disease? It makes you climb into the bowl and toss yourself…
monocots are transfected by electroporation or micropipetting, amirite? not with ‘virus particle genes’, whatever those are.
BT bacterium are sprayed extensively now and available everywhere.
sierra club considers it NATURAL…lol
http://www.sierraclub.ca/national/programs/health-environment/pesticides/bt-fact-sheet.shtml
When evaluating the merits of foods, dietary practices, etc., one should always consider the effects on gut flora. Western maladies may be as much a result of medical and dietary insults to our inner “Whoville” (as in Horton Hears a Who) as to the presence or absence of nutrients, genetics, environmental factors, etc. Our little symbiotic friends are essential to health. They perform myriad beneficial functions including manufacturing vitamins, metabolizing otherwise indigestable nutrients, etc.
My interest in gut flora led me to begin brewing and consuming (with pleasure!) lactofermented beverages, particularly ginger beer, and therein lies a relevant anecdote. I had some commercial soda products lying about the house, leftovers from one of my sons’ social gatherings. Thinking I could turn the junk into something healthy through lactofermentation, I opened three bottles, let them outgas a bit, then inoculated them with some of my very active lactobacillus culture. Had they been mere flavored sugar water, they would have quickly begun fermenting and their sugar content reduced to be replaced by beneficial lactic acid compounds, etc. No such thing happened, even after weeks in a warm and dark environment. The likely explanation is of course that the sodas were “stabilized” by sorbates to prevent fermentation (“spoilage”). I couldn’t help wondering if sorbated commercial soft drinks might have the same effect in vivo, knocking our microbiotic friends– and thus our health– for a serious loop. Something to think about.
I also second the recommendation to check out the fascinating and sensible work of Dr. Weston A. Price (Nutrition and Physical Degeneration) and the organizations that follow in his footsteps: Price-Pottenger Foundation and the Weston A. Price Foundation. I also caution against an uncritical approach to the work of Ancel Keys, who I consider to be the Michael Mann of nutrition science, manipulating the results of his work in favor of low fat and vegetarian diets to the dire detriment of at least one generation’s health. For starters see
It is with the utmost respect that I say thank you Anthony, this man is a real scientist doing real stuff, that makes a positive difference. Much like the work you have done but more personal.
Have a bloody good christmas and have a bit of time out for yourself.
@Gnomish:
There are many ways to physically get the “package” into the nucleus of a target cell. From micropipettes to little gold bead bullets. (There are many choices for several of the various steps).
One of the problems is how to get the DNA embedded into the target genome. One of the ways to do that is take the chunk of a virus that inserts ITS DNA and just change the ‘payload’. Now your ‘golden bullet’ delivers a batch of this hybrid virus / payload DNA to the nucleus and the virus particle (since it came from a virus, but is only part of the whole DNA package) does the job of stitching the new DNA payload into the host genome.
Part of the payload is a ‘lock this gene on’ control sequence (you want that gene to be functioning, after all). The problem is that what with all the ruckus, like being fired in with a golden bullet and having a virus mini-machine slicing and dicing into the host DNA and all, well, things are not always done ‘just right’. Because of that, most cells so traumatized just up and die. (Not very comforting…)
But some few live. They were not so busted up as to be DOA, but may have all sorts of ‘not quite right’ problems. These are grown to maturity and used to make the final GMO seed crop. One hopes that the evaluation / selection process catches any ‘big ooopsies’, but it is not guaranteed.
Per BT:
It isn’t broken down by cooking. The kind used in ‘organic’ farming is a bacterium that can be washed off the food. It is not built into every single cell of the volume in such a way that it can not be removed, as it is in GMO plants. The bacterium is unlikely to be consumed by other bacteria (so the gene for BT tends to stay in that bacteria). The BT gene in a rotting bit of GMO plant in the gut is just the kind of thing that other bacteria break down and consume. Bacteria often pick up bits of DNA from their environment. ( Messy eaters 😉 This means it’s only a matter of time…
Per DNA denaturing:
It goes back where it was upon cooling. There are animals living on black smokers in several hundred degree water…
There are nice little bacteria that live in your stomach and make ulcers. There are a large number of viruses and bacteria that make it through the stomach and cause all sorts of digestive diseases. The stomach is not protection from foreign DNA inside cells.
The pancreas dumps into the intestines after the stomach…
NO digestion is perfect, there are lots of things poorly broken down and many active parts floating around all along the pathway. Besides, partial digestion makes it even more likely that a bacterium (or even your own intestinal lining) will have that BT toxin genes (or any others) floating around where it might get picked up (as it has been snipped out of the nucleus and made available).
These kinds of processes happen all the time. It’ how bacteria change. They are even so fond of picking up and swapping around bits of DNA that they have a dedicated set of structures for it. Plasmids. It’s how they swap antibiotic resistance between bacterial species…
Per yields:
Many GMO varieties have shown lower yields, not higher. They do cut back a great deal on labor required. (You can wholesale drench the crop in Roundup a few times during growth, so no disking weeds or such needed) But herbicide use goes way up. It is about reducing COSTS (that is a good thing) mostly, and not about more yield ( for most GMOs).
It is a large and complicated topic, and not really appropriate here ( i.e. it would become a ‘thread hijack’) so I’d rather not expand on this more. It is well covered elsewhere. If you really want to do more “to and fro” on it, hit my blog with a comment and I’ll open a GMO thread.
But, in short: No, you are not right.
(And there’s a few dozen more, often worse, problem with GMOs, such as landrace genetic pollution and more… I’m prone to allergies. What happens when folk develop a food allergy to BT toxin and it’s in everything? BT Toxin is a known allergen… Just for starters…)
David
What was the rate of diagnosis and cure for these cancers when western civilizations emerged from an agrarian society?
Could we also suggest diet is the cause of autism on the basis of the numbers diagnosed in the USA vs the prevalence in Vietnam?
Sorry for appearing skeptical but we are currently dealing with doctors prescribing iodine drops on you skin for people who end up in hospital with pneumonia.