Author Archives: Paul Jaminet - Page 129

What Makes a Centenarian?

Posted by on August 16, 2010 15 comments

What makes a centenarian?  One ingredient, I think, is home cooking.

I had some fun with a nutritional brain teaser not long ago. The point of it was that almost any food – including cookies, ice cream, and potato chips – can be healthy if the ingredients are good, and any food will be unhealthy if the ingredients are toxic. Unfortunately, most prepared foods in supermarkets, and many restaurant foods, are made with toxic ingredients. It’s a sad commentary on today’s world; but if you want a long life, it’s almost essential to cook your own food.

I get a daily Google alert with news stories about centenarians. One of the most common features is that centenarians like to cook. The following three stories all came on the same day:

Via the Leesburg (Florida) Daily Commercial:

Great-great grandmother Mary D. Nix, 101, has a zest for life and believes it’s vital to live by the Golden Rule.

“I’m going to keep on living,” she said….

Born on July 28, 1909, in Leary, Ga., she married her husband, Elijah, when she was 16. The couple lived in Tangerine and Nix worked for more than 40 years as a domestic housekeeper.

“She worked for rich people all of her life, keeping the houses cleaned, their dinners cooked, and children fed,” said Thelma Hayes Wooden, the second oldest of Nix’s 17 grandchildren.

“She still thinks a woman’s job is in the kitchen,” Wooden said with a chuckle, recalling her grandmother would share advice with her family and others in her care.

Via the Burton (Staffordshire, UK) Mail:

The birthday girl said she used to enjoy cooking, knitting, sewing and gardening when she was younger.

Mrs Wright said: “I enjoy life very much and especially living in the home….

 “I’ve had so many highlights in my life and I couldn’t tell you what the secret to a long and happy life is, as I’m not sure.”

Via the New Haven (Connecticut) Register:

Her other son, Anthony Monaco of Denver, Colo., said his mother was feisty, a great cook and a hard worker. “She and my dad did a very good job of putting food on the table and raising us,” he said. “She would walk two miles from work to home each night, stop at the store and gather all the ingredients for that night’s dinner, come home, make dinner and get out the ironing board.

“She worked hard all day and pretty much all night. She also was a devout Catholic.”
Monaco died July 12 at age 100….

In her spare time, she liked to play cards, crochet, knit, cook, garden, walk, go to the casinos, dance and listen to Italian music.

Another common feature of centenarians is that they are cheerful and highly sociable. Centenarians always seem to have many friends.

Sociability does not always imply marriage: a surprisingly large number of centenarian women have never married. But marriage is no bar to longevity, as Wook Kundor of Malaysia shows:

Centena­rian Wook Kundor is all alone again.

Her husband Mohd Noor Musa, who is seven decades her junior, was rearrested for a drug-related offence on Sunday….

“He reneged on his promise not to indulge in drugs. But I can’t live without him,” she said when met here yesterday….

“I don’t know what is wrong with him. Probably he is bored without a steady job,” she said.

Wook Kundor said police had told her that her husband had tested positive for heroin….

She married Mohd Noor, her 23rd husband, five years ago.

Perhaps what makes a centenarian is this: “You can go to extremes with impossible schemes / You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams / And life gets more exciting with each passing day / And love is either in your heart or on its way / Don’t you know that it’s worth every treasure on earth / To be young at heart.”

Statin Idiocy

Posted by on August 13, 2010 4 comments

You may have noticed the ludicrous proposal from a group of British doctors, published in the American Journal of Cardiology [1], that statins should be distributed with McDonald’s value meals to reverse the cholesterol-raising effects of cheeseburgers metabolic syndrome induced by sugar and omega-6 fat toxicity.

Various bloggers have discussed their proposal, and if you are interested here are some links:

We rarely discuss drugs, since we’re diet and nutrition focused, but briefly, statins should be avoided because they do a mix of benefits and harms, of which the benefits are minor and can be better achieved by other means, and the harms can be immense:

  • Coenzyme Q10 deficiencies impairing mitochondrial function and producing potentially life-threatening muscle weakness (myopathy).
  • Cholesterol deficiencies impairing cell movement, cell division, and wound healing and increasing risk of infectious disease and cancer.
  • A myriad of other effects, including liver damage, kidney damage, and cataracts.

It appears that the benefits of statins are achieved mainly through two mechanisms – an elevation of vitamin D synthesis and a mild anti-inflammatory effect. (Cholesterol-lowering drugs which lack these effects have proven to be highly poisonous.) Normalizing vitamin D levels through sunshine and supplements would eliminate the first benefit; eating a diet low in food toxins would eliminate the second benefit. So for people practicing healthy diets, there is likely to be no benefit from statins at all, and much harm.

It’s telling that clinical trials conducted since trial regulations were tightened a few years ago have failed to show any benefit from statins. [2] Earlier trials were biased in various ways, including in many cases a failure to report overall mortality or deaths from infectious disease and cancer, and a severe publication bias in which trials producing negative effects were suppressed.

Meanwhile simple, inexpensive steps like supplementation can have much bigger health benefits than statins. Normalizing vitamin D levels can cut mortality in half [3, 4] and supplementing vitamin K2 can reduce mortality by 26%. [5]

So, if we don’t normally discuss drugs, what prompted this post?  My eye was caught by Stephan’s observation that farm subsidy modifications could greatly improve public health:

Rather than giving people statins along with their Big Mac, why don’t we change the incentive structure that artificially favors the Big Mac, french fries and soft drink? If it weren’t for corn, soybean and wheat subsidies, fast food wouldn’t be so cheap. Neither would any other processed food. Fresh, whole food would be price competitive with industrial food, particularly if we applied the grain subsidies to more wholesome foods.

I’ve long advocated this change myself. It’s ironic that the US government managed to pick the most toxic foods – wheat, corn, and soybeans – for its agricultural subsidies. 

It’s often pointed out that U.S. longevity is worse than would be expected based on our GDP. Here’s a chart from gapminder.org – click for a legible version:

If you fit a curve and measure distance beneath the curve, among rich nations only Brunei, Qatar, and maybe Luxembourg and Liechtenstein perform worse than the US. Americans die years earlier than we ought.

The reason for this is probably mainly our agricultural subsidies and the high intake of toxic foods they have engendered. (Our high intake of health-impairing drugs like statins may also contribute.) As I commented on Stephan’s blog:

If we ate rice instead of wheat, butter instead of soybean oil, and drank tea instead of corn syrup, Americans might be the longest-lived people in the world.

Diet and nutrition are the keys to health, yet they are the ugly stepchildren of American medicine. Drugs remain the favored and spoiled son, producing little but beloved.

References

[1] Ferenczi EA et al. Can a Statin Neutralize the Cardiovascular Risk of Unhealthy Dietary Choices? Am J Cardiol. 2010 Aug 15;106(4):587-592. http://pmid.us/20691321.

[2] de Lorgeril M. Disappointing recent cholesterol-lowering drug trials: is it not time for a full reappraisal of the cholesterol theory? World Rev Nutr Diet. 2009;100:80-9. http://pmid.us/19696530.

[3] Dobnig H et al. Independent association of low serum 25-hydroxyvitamin d and 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin d levels with all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. Arch Intern Med. 2008 Jun 23;168(12):1340-9. http://pmid.us/18574092.

[4] Pilz S et al. Vitamin D and mortality in older men and women. Clin Endocrinol (Oxf). 2009 Nov;71(5):666-72. http://pmid.us/19226272.

[5] Geleijnse JM et al. Dietary Intake of Menaquinone Is Associated with a Reduced Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: The Rotterdam Study. J Nutr. 2004 Nov;134(11):3100-5. http://pmid.us/15514282.

Nurse fails the puzzler

Posted by on August 12, 2010 7 comments

A few weeks back we discussed a nutritional brain teaser: what’s the healthiest snack, an apple, potato chips, cookie, or ice cream.  I concluded that, if prepared with the best ingredients, the ice cream and potato chips were the healthiest. (Of course, foods are rarely well prepared, and if I had to buy these things in supermarkets, I might go with the apple.)

LynMarie Daye brings news of a nurse who failed to solve the puzzler. The nurse tried to discourage a diabetic patient from eating ice cream – perhaps a wise move, considering the levels of sugar in most commercial ice cream; but only if better, not worse, foods replace the ice cream. The hospital administration reprimanded her for not providing the ice cream with a smile.

If I am going to give people what they want with a smile instead of what they need with understanding and caring, then I’ll flip burgers. I have ALWAYS greeted my patients (yes patients) with a smile, a caring hand on the shoulder if they allow and carefully explained what, why, and how. Lately I left a bedside with confidence that while not pleased with their situation, they were comfortable with it. An hour later I’m being called into the charge nurse’s office being chewed out for being mean and/or rude to the patient and/or the family! I did my nursing duty, I brought them that extra helping of ice cream with a teaching that this may not be their best choice for a diabetic and perhaps they would do better with the apple slices or sugar free cake I also brought along. But how rude of me to suggest such things! The “client” knows what is best for them, I’m told.

The nurse is well-intentioned but look what she recommends over ice cream – the most fructose-rich of fruits, the apple; and a cake full of toxic wheat proteins. Both these foods provide all calories as carbs, precisely the macronutrient that diabetics are least able to handle. When her diabetic finished the apple slices and was still hungry, would she bring more apples and cake?  At least the ice cream provides egg yolks and dairy fats that satiate appetite and displace carbs from the diet.

I wish I could say the hospital reprimanded her for faulty diet advice. Unfortunately, it seems the hospital’s only concern was the patient’s pleasure. It appears the hospital would be content to help patients poison themselves, if that would increase customer satisfaction.

They say you can lead a horse to water but can’t make him drink.  When it comes to diet, the medical industry has lost the way to the water and has given up leading. Frankly, I’d rather be a horse than a hospital patient.

The FDA Is On The Side of the Microbes

Posted by on August 11, 2010 12 comments

This should be the golden era of antimicrobial medicine. Molecular biology has over the last two decades created new diagnostic tools like real-time PCR which can isolate and amplify minute quantities of bacterial DNA to identify individual species. Today’s researchers can design antimicrobial drugs that specifically target proteins, RNA, and DNA of individual pathogens.

Existing antibiotics obtained from fungi and plants often interfere with human biology, creating side effects that limit doses. Tomorrow’s antibiotics should defeat pathogens with minimal side effects, by acting only against molecules specific to bacteria, fungi, viruses, and protozoa.

This blog believes that nearly all diseases have an infectious origin. Infections outrun the immune system due to dietary and nutritional inadequacies. Diet, nutrition, and new antimicrobials should enable nearly all diseases to be defeated.

We are on the cusp of enabling nearly everyone to live to age 100 in good health. All we need is a renewed focus on antimicrobial research, and better diets.

Yet nothing is happening.

Via frequent commenter erp comes an excellent story that explains why (Trine Tsouderos, “Arsenal of antibiotics not being restocked: Dispute over rules for approving new drugs stalls production even as concern rises over deadly resistant bacteria,” Chicago Tribune, August 6, 2010):

Drug companies are abandoning the antibacterial business, citing high development costs, low return on investment and, increasingly, a nearly decade-long stalemate with the Food and Drug Administration over how to bring new antibiotics to market.

Soon, doctors fear, we could be defenseless against bacteria that can resist all existing antibiotics, which would mean more victims like Simon, dead from a staph infection that drugs used to conquer easily.

Dr. Brad Spellberg, an expert on antibiotic resistance, called the situation “catastrophic.”

At the core of the problem is a regulatory impasse over whether drug companies seeking FDA approval for antibiotics should be required to run much more stringent clinical trials.

The FDA says yes, citing advances in the science of clinical trial design and a series of humiliations involving trials for drugs the agency had approved, including the antibiotic Ketek….

But the pharmaceutical industry and some infectious-disease doctors say the proposed rules will make it so difficult and expensive to gain approval for new antibiotics that the few remaining companies will abandon the field altogether….

At times the debate has been so heated that the acting chairman of an FDA committee opened a 2009 meeting by warning that he didn’t want to read the next day about police “having to arrest scientists for breaking shop windows and turning over cars.”…

For years, new antibiotics often were approved based on clinical trials that didn’t have to show the new drug was better than an old one. Instead it had to fall within an acceptable margin of efficacy, which meant it could test somewhat worse and still be considered a success.

Just how much worse is OK with the FDA lies at the heart of the debate. The FDA wants the margins for these “non-inferiority trials” to be scientifically justified, and that may result in margins much tighter than before.

Whatever legal considerations may lie behind the FDA’s position, from a medical point of view its planned rules are ridiculous. To be clinically valuable, new antibiotics don’t need to be better than existing ones, just different.  Against most diseases, combinations of antibiotics are the best therapy.  Striking at a bacterium by several independent mechanisms is highly effective at impairing its activity and helping the immune system defeat it.

The fact that bacteria evolve resistance makes the need for a steady stream of new antibiotics even more critical.

Adding to the problem is that it is not feasible to organize clinical trials large enough to evaluate efficacy:

But showing one antibiotic is superior to another is hard because many antibiotics work so well, Spellberg said….

Placebo trials, in which the drug is tested against a look-alike but useless pill or injection, are also unrealistic, according to some experts. It’s nearly impossible to persuade patients with a painful sinus infection to enroll in a study with a 50 percent chance of getting a sugar pill and not a drug, they said….

Some are suggesting that for community-acquired pneumonia, antibiotics trials might require as many as 10,000 patients at a cost of about $50,000 a patient, or $500 million.

The solution is simple. Antimicrobials should be evaluated for safety only. Doctors can work out efficacy quickly through clinical experience.

Dr. David Shlaes, who worked in pharmaceutical antibiotic development for decades and is now a consultant to the industry, said it is absurd to be, in effect, questioning if antibiotics work.

“This is like asking how do I know parachutes work?… Those of us in infectious disease, we are all scratching our heads wondering: What the hell they are talking about?” said Shlaes, whose book, “Antibiotics: The Perfect Storm,” will be published this fall. “It is like proving gravity all over again.”

Soon after reading this story I learned that our next door neighbor, a 62-year-old man in seemingly fine health, died over the weekend from an MRSA infection he contracted while in the hospital for a surgical procedure. The antibiotics that might have saved him were never developed, due to clinical trial requirements that are about to become even more onerous.

“Nobody can run those trials,” said Shlaes. “[FDA administrators] live in a different world. Their world is numbers and logic. It is not patients and life.”

Dr. Shlaes is exactly right. The bureaucrats are not concerned about patients and life. They are concerned about drugs embarrassing them, as Vioxx did.

Without effective antibiotics, the whole medical system falls apart, experts say.

Yes. But when it does, how many will realize that the FDA, and the politicians who wrote their governing legislation, are to blame?