Ten years ago, I worked with scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in writing a book about phylogenetics. Although it has “genetic” in it, phylogenetics isn’t principally about DNA. What it’s about is the relationship among organisms based on characteristics that are shared and not shared. Continue reading →

I’ve been reviewing critics of complementary and alternative medicine for a course I’m creating called “Critique of Health Practices.” It’s an odd literature. The criticisms are presented as an evaluation of alternative health practices from the perspective of the scientific method. Usually the alternative practices are found wanting. Critics typically show disdain, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly. Continue reading →

Researchers in the United Kingdom have found that a child exposed to antibiotics before the age of six months is more likely to become obese in later childhood and adulthood. More broadly, it means that the child’s energy metabolism has been harmed but antibiotics. It’s a mystery to me why this surprises anyone.

Fifty years ago, ranchers discovered that giving cattle a low dose of antibiotic increases their bulk and with it their market value. Since then we’ve also found that those antibiotics don’t stay in the animals but get spread throughout the environment, not only increasing the resistance of pathogens to treatment. And, of course, the antibiotics that do stay in the animal are passed on to humans such as six month old babies.

Last week, researchers at the University of Chicago answered the question, “How come?”

One would think that the metabolic disruption was the result of killing off a portion of the infant’s gut bacteria. Although true, it’s only half the picture. As you might know, your gut bacteria are in intimate communication with your immune system. A disruption in your immune system by itself can cause an imbalance in your gut microbiome and with it a disruption to your energy metabolism. It’s also true that your diet will change the ecology of your gut microbiome.

So the way this works is…

On one side, something such as a change in diet or the use antibiotics changes your gut ecology. On the another side, your immune system responds to that change. And on yet another side, your ability to absorb nutrients is affected depending on how your immune system works. The specific thing at work is an element of the innate immune system (which is the non-specific, non-antibody, first line of defense against potential threats).

The element is called lymphotoxin but was formerly called tumor necrosis factor beta, a cytokine responsible of clearing disruptive gut bacteria. If that part of the immune system isn’t working right, your energy metabolism is destabilized. And when that happens, your body doesn’t do what it’s supposed to: use the nutrients it needs and get rid of the rest.

This is a good lesson in the first law of ecology: everything is connected to everything else.

It also makes a mockery of the so-called energy balance equation used by every popular work and much of the conventional scientific work on weight gain and loss and energy metabolism generally. The energy balance equation says that calories eaten must equal calories used plus calories gained or lost in body fat.

What the University of Chicago research says is that, given one state of the immune system, calories eaten, however many, will equal calories used plus calories excreted with no weight gain. In another state of the immune system, the balance between calories used, calories gained, and calories excreted can be something else—including dramatic and unexpected weight gain.

But that wasn’t the message delivered in the press. In reporting on the research, the University of Chicago PR department and with it the media prominently promote the idea that now vaccines and antibiotics can be developed to fine-tune the gut microbiome and immune system to treat obesity. This is appalling.

Here’s an opportunity to re-examine a critical health issue, but instead it gets filed away with conventional technologies. In environmental economics we call such things end of the pipe technologies. The idea of using vaccines and antibiotics to cause an out-of-balance gut microbiome to re-balance itself is at the end of the pipe. Shouldn’t we instead be thinking about what we eat and what we’re exposed to that disrupts our innate immunity? That is, things at the beginning of the pipe?

Of course, it goes without saying the no one is going to think about the unintended consequences of fine-tuning our energy metabolism with vaccines and antibiotics because, as we all know, these are tried and true technologies that have been around for almost a century and nothing bad ever happens from their use. Except of course for the babies who will get fat because they were exposed to an antibiotic through, among other sources, animals that were fattened for market.

I was at dinner with friends one evening and used the phrase “the politics of science.” Another guest, trained as a physicist, didn’t know what I meant. He knew, of course, that science gets kicked around in the political process. But, in his view, the practice of science has nothing to do with politics—it’s just the facts and enlightened discourse.

The politics of health science show up in two places: in how health science reaches civilians such as you and me and in how the results of health science are produced and accepted as facts in the first place.

When I was young, eggs were recommended as a high quality food. As I grew older the cholesterol theory of heart disease took hold and as a consequence eggs were discouraged because they are high in cholesterol. Then later eggs were let off the hook when it was recognized that serum cholesterol (that is, cholesterol in the blood) is unrelated to dietary cholesterol from eggs.

The egg industry rejoiced.

Those who understood that the cholesterol theory of heart disease is nonsense ate eggs throughout. But for those who followed scientific thinking, eggs were in, then out, then in again.

Last week, the media reported Canadian researchers found that eating eggs is as dangerous as smoking. MSNBC, Fox News, and the Huffington Post among others dutifully reported the results with headlines such as “Egg Yolks As Dangerous As Smoking, Experts Say.”

So you might think this is a bit of alarmist hyperbole by the media. In fact, it’s part of the research design, a central feature that provides what the researchers call “perspective on the magnitude of the effect.”

So the journalists are innocent of misreporting the science, which is manipulative by design. However, they are guilty of failing to critically present the science in context. For example, they fail to mention the many factors left out of the analysis that might explain the greater effect of eggs on people. Nor is there a discussion of the age of the subjects for this study: all 61 and older. Nor of the study subject’s medical condition: already diagnosed as at risk of heart disease. Nor of the well-known fact that high cholesterol in the elderly reduces the risk of what’s politely referred to as “heart events.”

But even if that information was in the news reports, what most people are going to hear is that eggs are as bad as smoking and, if they’ve got any sense, they’ll stop eating eggs—which seems to be the intention of the researchers.

That’s politics: getting other people to do what you want—even if it’s not in their interest.

Yet another failure of the reporting is structural. It’s news. And, as you know, if it’s new it’s better. Yet actual science consists, not of snappy and eye-popping facts that capture our attention, but careful observation and corroboration. This was only one study. And yet everything about how this research is presented to you presses you to change what you eat.

John Ioannidis is a researcher who made fame with an article titled “Why Most Published Research Results Are False.” (Ioannidis, 2005) By implication, what journalists report about most research is equally false.

The same forces are also at work in the scientific community: the focus on the new and novel, the loyalty to institutionally sanctioned ideas, and the profound inability to critically evaluate actually existing evidence.

In an opinion piece to the New York Times, H. Gilbert Welch writes, “The truth is that for a large part of medical practice, we don’t know what works.” In answer to what needs to be done, he says, “Medical research is dominated by research on the new: new tests, new treatments, new disorders and new fads. But above all, it’s about new markets. We don’t need to find more things to spend money on; we need to figure out what’s being done now that is not working.”

As I’m sure you know, fascination with the new is not unique to health and medicine. Nor is the force of commerce, which fosters and exploits the fascination with the new, which caters to our monkey curiosity.

Welch’s recommendations include developing a healthy skepticism among physicians that would give them the skills and the courage to question the standard of care. He acknowledges that, currently, to do so is to commit “career suicide.”

If losing the fascination with the new and gaining a healthy skepticism and the courage to question the standard of care are good for medical science, shouldn’t it be good for us too? Unfortunately, because they don’t know what works, neither can we—which is far worse than career suicide since it leads to suicide by ignorance.

So tomorrow I’m having an omelette.

As I’m sure you know, statins are among the most widely prescribed drugs on the planet—exceeded in sales only by anti-depressants. Originally developed to lower cholesterol and thereby reduce the risk of heart attacks, statins have subsequently been promoted for use in a wide variety of conditions. For example, just yesterday the New York Times reported on a study that found depression was lower in people taking statins. Continue reading →

Why are people still smoking? Don’t they know it’s bad for their health? Continue reading →

If you’re in a room with 100 people, 20 of them will be chemically sensitive. What that means is that they react to such things as fragrance, paint, cleaning products, pesticides, glues, plastics, carpet, and car exhaust with anything from a headache to a seizure. Continue reading →

What’s true of a population isn’t true of any individual person in it. For example, a population has an average height. No single person is exactly that height. To confuse the two is to commit what is called the ecological fallacy. Continue reading →

David Erdal is a management consultant working in Britain. He advises workers on how to take over a company and run it as a cooperative. It’s a booming business. It turns out that the cooperative sector in Britain is bigger than the agriculture sector. Continue reading →

As I’m sure you know, a diabetes epidemic is assaulting our children. Continue reading →