Butterflies, Warming, and Politics

Some years ago I could write a long blog post, and know that people could take the whole thing in, long sentences, long paragraphs and all.  But today, most people expect to get the gist of a post from the top few lines, and so it's safe to think that no one gets much from my blog at all.

Without doubt, this trend towards impatience with any sort of sophisticated idea has resulted both in Climate Change, and President Trump.  Read on, if you dare.

Let's start off with Cholesterol. It has been most of a century since Cholesterol has been identified as an accessory to heart attacks.  When the raw information hit the news, the public made a quite forgivable leap to the conclusion that eating Cholesterol-containing foods would lead to heart-attacks.  Soon there were numerous witch-hunts to identify these foods, and the following were discovered as the worse culprits:

Eggs. Bacon. Butter. Milk-fat. Shrimp. Oysters. Red meat. Organ Meat*. Meat Fat**.

People stopped eating these things, and kept worrying about them for years.  [*E.g. liver  **E.g. bacon and lard].

The reaction was extreme.  People began to stop eating butter (which was a good thing, if a little extreme), and fell back on a butter-substitute that had been used during WW2, namely Margarine.  Margarine was not only cheaper, now we 'knew' that it was better for us.  Consumption of all these Cholesterol Culprits fell off dramatically.  Some folks, however, regarded all this with deep resentment.  Some bacon-lovers viewed the 'ban' on bacon as a personal attack, and defiantly began eating it more extensively than ever before, sneering at those who cut down on it, and the beginning of Hostility to Science, I believe, can be traced to these individuals.  This falls under the generalized category of killing the messenger.  "Uncle Bill scorned the idea of Cholesterol! He thought it was an invention of the Communists, to make life miserable for us, you know. He died young, but he lived well, God bless him."

Some in the medical education business were delighted, and others nervous, because, of course, the Press was not reporting the ifs, ands and buts that had a lot to do with this information.

The first major issue to be dealt with was that the human body itself was able to manufacture Cholesterol. (The only reason I capitalize Cholesterol is to make it easier to pick out the word if by some amazing miracle one of my readers want to go back and re-read some useful bit of information I have provided here.) Now there was a rush to dismiss the Cholesterol scare as hopeless anyway; evidently the body creates its own --poison, if you will-- so we may as well eat all the butter we want, while we're alive to do it!  No.  The truth is somewhere in-between. Read carefully.

Cholesterol does have something to do with the plaque that is deposited in places in the arteries where the blood goes a little more slowly, or changes direction, and gradually this plaque (with the help of certain strains of bacteria) begins to slowly block the artery, which can cause a stroke, or a heart-attack.  But by being careful with your food, you can make sure your system does not have extra cholesterol that it tries to dump in your arteries.  Get it?

(Cholesterol is not all bad for us; in small amounts it helps with healing.  Don't try to manage the use of Cholesterol in healing yourself; I don't understand enough of it to be able to advise you; leave that to experts, one of whom I certainly am not.)

How does the body make Cholesterol, and out of what?  Most people (who still believe in science!) know by now, that it is out of certain sorts of saturated fats that we eat.

Once again, hordes of people (generally those whose scientific backgrounds were a little on the weak side, and who did not think to learn the whole story, because surely there were important details that had not been revealed yet) started to shun saturated fats with a vengeance, but not other fats.  (In case you're thinking of stopping here, let me give you a quick remark for those who think of reading as an unwelcome aerobic activity:

Fats in moderation are needed for general health.  As far as I know, avoiding only saturated fats (and so-called Trans Fats) and eating all other fats without other restrictions will probably lead to obesity.  Which is bad, because it makes the heart work harder, doing unhealthy work. Sure, the heart needs to regularly work hard doing so-called aerobic activity, brisk walking, aerobics, running, climbing, etc, briefly. Not doing regular aerobics so many times a week is bad for your heart, but making your heart simply labor--lugging your weight around, if you're overweight--is also bad.   (BTW, conventional margarine contained saturated fats. Modern butter-substitutes are not so bad, but read the labels.)

This is typical: "Tell me, are fats good or bad?" This is the kind of answer those who dislike and don't understand science are seeking.  Well, I ask them, are slum landlords good or bad? Well, they would probably waffle: It depends. Okay, think it over, and write me an essay for Monday.

Salt

Most of our salt comes from salt mines; or at least, it did, until recently.  But, over the years, sea salt, initially a sort of exotic thing, acquired a cachet; so much so that various processed food manufacturers began advertising that their product contains sea salt.  After a while, salt manufacturers were able to charge more for sea salt than they did for regular salt.  (It tastes exactly the same.) But wait: It has recently been reported that little bits of plastic have been found in many samples of sea salt.  Plastic in food is bad, isn't it.  Guess what's going to happen.  As millions of consumers line up to trade in their sea salt for non-sea salt, regular salt prices will snake up again.

Tell me what to do!

There is a reason why a simple answer cannot be given for almost any practical question.  (1) We still don't know everything about everything; (2) The quantitative consequences of any policy decision is still not available, so that we still can't precisely calculate how bad eating sea salt really is. (3) It depends on how the prices are set, how methods of extracting sea-salt are changed over the next few years, and what we discover about the long-term effects of plastic particles in our bodies.

That's the sort of situation that the Science-phobes who constitute the Alt-Right hate. This is the worst sort of pseudo-science, as far as they're concerned, and they're all set to cut funding for any sort of science, e.g. cancer research, genetic research, ocean research, because they do not want to hear any more bad news, and they want to lower taxes for themselves.

Light a Little Candle

I want to now head in a slightly different direction.  So far I have focused on the sad consequences of how food marketing, and how news about scientific findings result in mass movements which change people's perception of food items, and how people's eating habits sometimes result in major changes in health, often not for the better. (Furthermore, public discourse about people's self-images, especially those of kids--initially led by Liberals, admittedly--have resulted in curtailment of any public discourse about healthy weight in children, as Mrs. Obama discovered to her cost.  Nobody likes anyone saying that their kids are obese, even if they are.  Looking around you, you have to agree that the US population is getting distinctly portly, which has resulted in cars getting bigger, because some of our prosperous Baby Boomers would not even fit into a older model family sedan.  You watch: we're going to see some very large Chinese very soon, if eating habits in China progress as they have done here, and some of our least responsible fast-food chains are permitted to open up stores over there.  The logic here is that mankind was intended to be obese, and we did not achieve our perfect shape in years gone by, because food was scarce, or we could not afford it.

Have you noticed how untidy and full of trash streets and highways are becoming? No, they're not desperately trashy, because the municipalities have steadily deployed trash cans in convenient locations, restaurants are making it easier to put trash in receptacles, and little school-aged kids are enthusiastic about recycling, bless them, so that the tendency to be irresponsible about littering is partially offset by moderating forces.

In the past, a lot of the litter was paper litter; now it is almost exclusively plastic litter, some of which flows down the rivers into the sea, messing up the lungs and gills of whales and fish, and slipping into our Sea Salt. You might have blamed the litter on blacks, minorities and immigrants, and doubtless they are partly to blame, and you can easily arrive at excuses for them. Little kids rarely litter, in my experience; they're usually very indignant when they see littering. It is kids in their teens and twenties who are probably the culprits, especially those whose parents do not have much of a positive influence on them. I, for one, pick up a quarter to one half of the litter I see on the sidewalk, and drop it (sometimes illegally) in a trashcan. A FaceBook friend of mine supports a meme that says: New Rule: Every time you visit the beach, pick up at least 3 pieces of plastic!

Trying to find a nice graphic to accompany this section of the post, I stumbled on this page from the National Geographic.  Since National Geographic magazine was bought by Rupert Murdoch I have not supported it, nor depended on it for important information, but by all means read it; there is some information that you might like to see. But there seems to be a lot of we can't do anything until we know more, but it's impossible to really know rhetoric in there. Until some business discovers an angle to this problem that they can exploit, we're likely to remain in a state where acting on Ocean Plastic is considered premature.

Well. Business interests do tend to slow response to any environmental problem; consider, for instance, climate change. Exxon has known for years that use of gasoline is heating up the planet, but they hid behind the We need to know more excuse, just as the cigarette manufacturers did. (Until we do know more, let's give everybody cancer. That would be great.)

Unlike shunning saturated fats, picking up beach debris is unlikely to become an instant mass movement, but it is important to give young people a clear signal, by your actions, that de-littering the environment is not just a concern for mean teachers, but for the other adults in their lives as well.  I just do this, not worrying about whether I would be a significant influence on anyone, but now I have noticed that some of my friends are doing it too!  Yay for friends, but, well . . . Let it go, as Disney would say.  (Apropos of that, you might have noticed a lot of litter in the Star Wars movies.  Is that intentional?  Is it just a subtle way of making the protagonists and their environment more human?  It is sad to think that litter is a characteristic human concomitant.)  (Not sure whether 'concomitant' is the word I want.)
Arch

Is Cholesterol really bad for you? Is being overweight really bad?

.
The available information about the interrelation between heart disease, cholesterol, Omega-3 fatty acids, saturated fats, and high blood sugar is confusing, to say the least.  It is at least as confusing to medical practitioners as it is to laymen, because of the onslaught of vast amounts of information (some of it not very good) that physicians are regularly bombarded with.  Every doctor is constantly being given information from pharmaceutical companies, their alma maters, and medical agencies, and a significant proportion of this information is contradictory.  In addition, doctors are constantly under the threat of malpractice lawsuits.  Some of these lawsuits are frivolous and vicious, some of them are simply patients desperate to find financial resources to correct their medical conditions, because medical expenses are so high that not infrequently a lawsuit is the only way to obtain the means for pursuing treatment.  Not all doctors are quacks, and not all doctors are brilliant, and obviously a large number of doctors are just tired and jaded, and not as altruistic as we would want them to be.  Let's face it: we all suck, and doctors are no exception.  We have to be grateful that the health services in this country are not in worse shape than they are, given the conditions under which they operate.

Just recently, one Dr. Dwight Lundell, a former surgeon, was quoted as saying essentially the following:
(1) It isn't cholesterol that causes heart failure.
(2) Heart failure is caused by inflammation in the blood vessels.
(3) Inflammation is caused (among other things) by excessive amounts of processed foods, e.g. refined sugars such as corn syrup, lots of sugar generally, and Omega-6 fatty acids, such as found in Soybean oil.  (Omega-3 fatty acids are the good ones.)

This information, we find, was announced by Dr. Lundell as far back as 2007, though the information has begun recirculating once again this year.

On further examination, a sort of medical quack-hunting vigilante called Dr. Stephen Barrett has looked into Dwight Lundell's story, and has turned up that he has been in financial trouble with the IRS and has been on the brink of bankruptcy, and has lost his license to practice medicine in 2008 (though he has been practicing since about 1970).  He was also sued by at least two patients for incompetent post operative care.

Despite the hostility of Stephen Barrett, I find Lundell's analysis of the situation persuasive.  People are always looking for a silver bullet to remove the threat of heart disease once and for all.  Constantly consuming large quantities of polyunsaturated oils (Canola oil, for instance) is not the answer.  Lundell might be bad at managing his finances, and careless in his management of surgical patients (after-operation care is important, and intelligence on the part of the caregivers, the patient, and the patient's family is all needed for a good outcome), but he seems to be on the mark as far as his advice is concerned.

It is unfortunate that everyone wants the cure-all to solve all their problems.  To be healthy, you need to do a number of things.  I know what is needed, even if I don't do it myself!  Here is some obvious advice.  Bear in mind that (paraphrasing the immortal words of Robert Young) I'm not a doctor, though I play one on the Internet!

A.  Don't use poly-unsaturated oils exclusively.  Small quantities of Olive oil is good for most purposes; if you're stir-frying, Coconut oil is good.  Do your own reading; if you learn that this advice is not the best for you, act accordingly

B.  Don't consume too much fat.  A couple of slices of bacon once a week is probably fine, even if you're a seven-foot lumberjack.  Look up the ideal body weight for your height, and stay within a dozen pounds of that.

C.  Don't eat too much sugar.  The more you eat, the more you should exercise.  Don't eat too much of anything.  Don't eat too much white bread.  Don't encourage kids to eat sugar and white bread, because they will crave it when they're older.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made with wonder-bread might be a convenient soporific to administer to annoying kids, but in the long term they will pay the price.  Hopefully you won't be around to see when your kids become 300 pound couch potatoes.  All this propaganda that heavy is beautiful is a bunch of bull.  Nobody should weigh more than 5% beyond their ideal weight, even if they've been persuaded that they belong to a special "heavy" variant of the human species.  Especially kids should remain within their ideal weight, because heavy kids are at risk of turning into heavy adults.

There is general belief that a healthy self-image is more important than a healthy weight.  This is nonsense; both are important.  This trend of making the messenger feel guilty for delivering an unpleasant message is the creation of some idiot, and if I get my hands on him or her I will not be responsible for what I'll do.  Of course an overweight child is not entirely to blame for his or her condition: it is the family that must take the responsibility.  Occasionally it is some genetic or thyroid condition that is to blame.  But often thyroid conditions, I'm reading, are triggered by psychological factors.  I don't know how to deal with people who are eager to have their families classified as dysfunctional.

D.  Do eat unprocessed, or natural foods, which have a certain amount of fiber, such as oats, salads, green vegetables, whole wheat bread.

E.  Eat locally-grown produce.  I have started buying locally-grown lettuce, and it is awesome.  We also live in an area that has more than its fair share of Pennsylvania Dutch.  Now, PaDutch are not the healthiest people in the world; they do tend to eat a richer diet than will work for most of us.  But there's no faulting their produce.

F.  Choose your meat carefully, if possible.  Cold cuts in the summer months are difficult to avoid, but a healthy mix of meats is better than eating only chicken, or only turkey, or only beef.  Smoked meats should be eaten sparingly, i.e. once a week at most, and in small amounts, like a slice or two of bacon or ham.  It appears that eggs are not bad for us, if we stay under an egg a day.

G.  Do exercise in moderation.  Do not put too much stress on your feet and your knees.  If you're past the age of 50, consider wearing knee braces when you walk or row, or whatever.  This is to stave off problems later on.  Take your advice from your doctor; I don't want to contradict the doctor if he insists that knee braces are unnecessary.  (Check around, to see whether his other patients have bad knees.)  Avoid running, unless you run on padded surfaces, or run carefully on grass.  Do not run on asphalt or concrete.  Even if you don't exercise every day, try every other day.  Failing that, at least once a week.  Failing that, every other week.  Walk to church, if going to church is one of your vices.  Take a backpack, and put your jacket in it for the return walk, if you don't want to perspire in it.

H.  Prepare your own food.  Eating out should be an occasional thing.  Teach your kids to cook, starting early.  Kids of eleven and older can learn to fix simple food, and can certainly help with more complex food preparation.  Don't be intimidated by their reports of what their friends do or don't do.  Just because junior's buddies can't even slice bread for themselves doesn't mean junior should be just as inept.  Don't take klutziness as an excuse.  Klutzes are learned, not born.

Finally, be objective when judging how competent your family physician is.  Find a good one.  Keep an ear out for who your friends think is a good doctor, and switch when the opportunity arises.  Be a full participant in your health; learn the facts about any condition you have, and be a full partner when you or someone in your family falls ill.  This is good general advice, just as you must be a full participant in your child's education.  I'm not suggesting that you debate things with your child's teacher; I simply want to encourage you to take an interest in the material, help with preparation, give positive feedback, and be sensible about criticism.  Don't outsource important things like health and education, as if you're handing it over to H & R Block.  Even your taxes, for that matter, deserve your full participation.

I'm sorry to come across as being preachy.  It is important to be unambiguous about certain things which people like to misunderstand in the direction of taking it as an endorsement of bad habits.  "See, Barbara, it says here that it is okay to be overweight!"  No; I only said that 5% overweight is the most that you should allow yourself.  Don't misunderstand this sort of advice.

Arch