Acid test

Apparently the most popular fad in alt-med nutrition these days is the so-called "alkaline diet."

The idea here is that lots of diseases -- cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer's are the four most commonly mentioned -- are caused by your body having an "acid pH."  All you have to do, they say, is alter your diet to foods that result in "alkaline ash" (residues with a pH above 7) and you'll be healthy and happy and disease free.  (Here's one example.)

As is the case with most of these sorts of claims, it has a kernel of truth.  There are foods that result in alkaline ash; others that have acidic ash; and some that have neutral (pH = about 7) ash.  The easiest way to monitor this is to test your urine pH, as your kidneys regulate your blood pH by excreting or retaining hydrogen ions, which is what pH is measuring in any case.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Further, a lot of the alkaline ash foods -- fruits and nuts especially -- are certainly part of a healthy diet, and some of the acidic ash foods -- meat, poultry, fish, dairy, grains and alcohol -- are problematic if they make up too great a percentage of your diet.

But that's where the realistic bit ends, and the pseudoscience takes over.

The fact is, you can't change your body's pH, for the very good reason that it's one of the most tightly-regulated homeostatic factors in your body.  If you're in good health, your blood pH is always 7.4.  If it varies more than 0.1 pH points either direction, you are in a world of hurt.  Here's a quick summary of what happens if your blood becomes more acidic:

pH = 7.4 -- happy and healthy
pH = 7.3 -- blood acidosis; symptoms are shortness of breath, headache, confusion
pH = 7.2 -- dead

And the same for moving in the alkaline direction:

pH = 7.4 -- happy and healthy
pH = 7.5 -- blood alkalosis; symptoms are nausea, muscle spasms, twitching, numbness
pH = 7.6 -- dead

So the idea that by eliminating meat from your diet, you'll become more alkaline, and that's somehow a good thing, is idiotic.  Each tissue in your body has a particular pH at which it functions best -- some are acidic (e.g. the stomach), some are alkaline (e.g. the blood and the small intestine), and (more importantly) changing that pH in any of them would be a seriously bad idea.

The bottom line is that if our pH yo-yoed around every time we ate a cheeseburger or an apple, we'd be dead.  End of story.

Now, it's true that your urine pH varies a lot; that's because your kidneys are regulating your blood pH by excreting whatever it takes to keep your blood in homeostasis.  So of course your urine pH changes.  It's compensating for what you eat and drink.  But there's nothing healthier about having alkaline urine.  All it means is that your kidneys are working, which is the same thing that having acidic urine means.

The funny thing is, the "alkaline diet" site I linked above gives a nod to that idea in the following paragraph: 

Even very tiny alterations in the pH level of various organisms can cause major problems.  For example, due to environmental concerns, such as increasing CO2 deposition, the pH of the ocean has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 and various life forms living in the ocean have greatly suffered.  The pH level is also crucial for growing plants, and therefore it greatly affects the mineral content of the foods we eat.  Minerals in the ocean, soil and human body are used as buffers to maintain optimal pH levels, so when acidity rises, minerals fall.

Right.  So that's why we have kidneys.  So that kind of shift in pH and other electrolytes doesn't kill us.

You'd think that a quick perusal of sites regarding actual research on the effects of diet (here's a good example) would immediately settle that point, but unfortunately the availability of correct information hasn't stopped the claims.  And worse, there are people now selling all sorts of supplements that are supposed to regulate our pH, and without which dire things are predicted to happen.

Me, I'm fond of the dietary advice "everything in moderation."  Listen to your body, eat a good balance of nutrients, get plenty of exercise, stay hydrated, don't spend your money on useless supplements, and don't go crazy overboard on something like the amazing grapefruit-and-peanut-butter diet.  (I don't know if that actually exists, but given some of the bizarre diets out there, I'll bet it does.)

Best of all, learn a little bit of biology.  It's cool, it's interesting, and it'll keep you from getting suckered by alt-med nonsense.  And with that, I think I'm going to go have some bacon and eggs for breakfast, confident in the knowledge that my kidneys are up to the challenge.

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Raw deal

A friend of mine, a veterinarian in Scotland, has proven to be a wonderful source of topics for Skeptophilia, mostly on health-related issues.  Her skeptical, evidence-based approach has given her a keen eye for nonsense -- and man, in this field, there's a lot of nonsense to choose from.

Her latest contribution was so over-the-top at first I thought it was a parody.  Sadly, it's not.  So, dear readers, allow me to introduce you to:

The Raw Meat Carnivore Diet.

Once I ruled this out as an example of Poe's Law, my next guess was that it was the creation of someone like Andrew Tate to prove to us once and for all that he's the alpha-est alpha that ever alpha-ed, but again, this seems not to be the case.  Apparently, this is being seriously suggested as a healthy way to eat.  And it's exactly what it sounds like; on this diet, you're to eat only raw meat from ruminants (beef, bison, lamb, elk, etc.), salt, and water.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jellaluna, Raw beef steak, 2011, CC BY 2.0]

At the risk of stating what is (I devoutly hope) the obvious, this is a really really REALLY bad idea.  Cooking your food remains the easiest and best way to sterilize it, killing pathogens like E. coli, Salmonella, Shigella, Campylobacter, and Staphylococcus aureus, as well as other special offers like various parasitic worms I'd prefer not to even think about.  The writer of the article, one Liam McAuliffe, assures us that the acidity in our stomach is perfectly capable of killing all of the above pathogens -- which leads to the question of why, then, anyone ever becomes ill from them.

Then there's a passage about an experiment back in the 1930s showing that cats fed a raw meat diet were generally healthier, which may be true, but ignores the fact that cats are damn close to obligate carnivores, and we're not.  To convince yourself that cats and humans have evolved to thrive on different diets, all you have to do is look at the teeth.  Cats have what are called carnassial molars; narrow, with sharp shearing edges, designed to cut meat up into chunks.  Our molars are flat, with cusps, typical of -- you guessed it -- an omnivore.  Citing the cat experiment as a reason we should all eat raw meat is a little like observing that cows thrive when allowed to graze in verdant fields, and deciding that henceforth humans should eat nothing but grass.

This brings up something else that Mr. McAuliffe conveniently neglects to mention; to have our digestive systems function properly, humans (and other omnivores) need to have a good bit of plant-derived cellulose in our diets -- what dietitians call "roughage" or "fiber."  Without it, our intestines clog up like a bad drain.  Eliminating all the vegetables from your diet is a good way to end up with terminal constipation.

What a way to go.  Or not go, as the case may be.

Then, there's a bit about how cooking meat reduces the amount of nutrients it contains -- specifically the B vitamins thiamine, riboflavin, and niacin.  Once again, this may well be true; but even if it is, the next question is, how many of us are deficient enough in these nutrients that the loss from cooking is actually a problem?  Let me put it this way; how many people do you know who have had beriberi (thiamine deficiency) or pellagra (niacin deficiency)?  (Riboflavin deficiency is so rare it doesn't even have a name.)  The fact is, if you're eating a normal diet, you are almost certainly getting more of these vitamins than you need, and the small amount of loss from cooking your t-bone steak is far offset by the benefit of not dying from an E. coli infection.

Not to beat the point unto death, but McAuliffe's contention -- that we are, in his words, "hypercarnivorous apex predators" -- is nonsense.  Our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, are thoroughgoing omnivores, who will certainly eat meat when they can get it but also love fruit, and will chow down on starch-rich roots and stems without any apparent hesitation.  What's optimal for human health, and which has been demonstrated experimentally over and over, is a varied diet including meat (or an equivalent protein source), vegetables, and fruits -- just like our jungle-dwelling cousins.

So.  Yeah.  Go easy on the moose tartare.  I'm of the opinion that a steak with a glass of fine red wine is a nice treat, but let's avoid eating it raw, okay?

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Eat like a werewolf

I'm sure that by now all of you have heard of the "Paleo Diet," that claims that the path to better health comes from eating like a cave man (or woman, as the case may be) -- consuming only foods that would have been eaten by our distant ancestors living on the African savanna.  The "Paleo Diet," therefore, includes grass-fed meat (cow is okay if you can't find gazelle), eggs, fish, root vegetables, fruits, nuts, and mushrooms.  Not included are dairy products (being that domestication of cattle and goats was post-cave-man), potatoes, salt, sugar, and refined oils.

Despite gaining some traction, especially amongst athletes and bodybuilders, the "Paleo Diet" has been looked upon with a wry eye by actual dieticians.  A survey of experts in the field, sponsored by CNN, placed the "Paleo Diet" as dead last in terms of support from peer-reviewed research and efficacy at promoting healthy weight loss.

But the "Paleo Diet" will sound like quantum physics, technical-science-wise, as compared to the latest diet to take the world of poorly-educated woo-woos by storm:

The "Werewolf Diet."

I wish I were making this up.  I also wish, for different reasons, that it was what it sounded like -- that people who sign up find themselves, once a month, sprouting fur and fangs and running around naked and eating unsuspecting hikers.  That, at least, would be entertaining.

[Image from Weird Tales (November 1941) is in the Public Domain]

But no such luck.  The Werewolf Diet, however, does resemble being an actual werewolf in that (1) what you get to eat is tied to the phases of the Moon, (2) it more or less ruins your health, and (3) it completely fucks up any chance at a normal social life.

The site "Moon Connection" describes the whole thing in great detail, but they make a big point of their stuff being copyrighted material, so I'll just summarize so that you get the gist:

You have two choices, the "basic plan" or the "extended plan."  On the "basic plan," you fast for 24 hours, either on the full Moon or the new Moon.  You can, they say, "lose up to six pounds of water weight" by doing this, but why this is a good thing isn't clear.

The "extended plan," though, is more interesting.  With the "extended plan," you fast during the full Moon, then eat a fairly normal diet during the waning part of the Moon cycle (with the addition of drinking eight glasses of water a day to "flush out toxins").  On the new Moon, you should fast again, only consuming dandelion tea or green tea (more toxin flushing).  During the waxing part of the Moon cycle, you must be "disciplined" to fight your "food cravings," and avoid overeating.  "Thickeners," such as sugar and fats, should be avoided completely, and you can't eat anything after 6 PM because that's when the Moon's light "becomes more visible."

Then you hit the full Moon and it all starts over again.

Well, let me just say that this ranks right up there with "downloadable medicines" as one of the dumbest things I have ever read.  We have the whole "flushing toxins" bullshit -- as if your kidneys and liver aren't capable of dealing with endogenous toxic compounds, having evolved for millions of years to do just that.  We're told, as if it's some sort of revelation, that our "food cravings will increase" after we've been consuming nothing but green tea for 24 hours.  Then we are informed that the Moon's gravitational pull has an effect on us, because we're 60% water -- implying that contrary to what Isaac Newton said, the gravitational pull an object experiences depends not on its mass but on what it's made of.  Or that your bloodstream experiences high tide, or something, I dunno.  And also, the gravitational pull the Moon exerts upon you somehow depends on the phase it's in, because, apparently, the amount of light reflecting from the Moon's surface mysteriously alters its mass.

I mean, I'm not a dietician, but really.  And fortunately, there are dieticians who agree.  Keri Gans, a professional dietician and author of The Small Change Diet, said in an interview, "This diet makes me laugh.  I don’t know if it’s the name or that people will actually believe it.  Either way, it is nothing but another fad diet encouraging restriction.  Restriction of food will of course lead to weight loss, but at what cost to the rest of your body?  If only celebrities, once and for all, would start touting a diet plan that makes sense and is based on science."

Yes.  If only.  But unfortunately, fewer people have heard of Gans, and (evidently) the scientific method, than have heard of Madonna and Demi Moore, who swear by the Werewolf Diet.  Not that Moore, especially, is some kind of pinnacle of rationality; she is a devotee of Philip Berg's "Kabbalah Centre," which preaches that "99% of reality cannot be accessed by the senses."

Nor, apparently, by logic and reason.

Interestingly enough, as I'm writing this it's just past the new Moon, so we're all supposed to be subsisting on dandelion tea.  To which I answer: the hell you say.  I'm off to get some bacon and eggs.  Detoxify that, buddy.

**************************************

I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The bones speak

Yesterday I ran into two unrelated studies that are kind of interesting in juxtaposition.

The first was in the journal Heritage Science, and was authored by a team led by Kaare Lund Rasmussen of the University of Southern Denmark.  It describes analysis of bones taken from 17th century Franciscan friaries in Italy and Denmark, looking specifically at trace element levels as an indicator of wealth, diet, medical treatments, and pollutants. 

The similarities were as fascinating as the differences.  In both places, bones from tombs of wealthy patrons were lower in strontium and barium than were bones from the cloisters, where the rank-and-file monks were buried.  This was likely due to the better (and more meat-rich) diet of nobles; ordinary folks ate a great deal more in the way of cereals and grains, which tend to have higher amounts of those trace elements.

On the other hand, the Italian bones had over twenty times the amount of copper that the Danish bones, regardless of social standing.  This was almost certainly because of cookware traditions; there was a long history of Italians of all classes using copper cook pots and storage vessels, whereas the Danes rarely did.

Lead followed the opposite pattern from strontium and barium; the wealthier people had higher amounts of lead in their bones, regardless of where they were from.  Rich people had pewter vessels and serving ware, earthenware coated with lead-based glazes, and (in some cases) lead water intake pipes for indoor plumbing and lead sheets on the roofs of their houses.  Plus -- something that I'd never heard of -- fine wine sometimes had added lead salts, put in to stop it from spoiling.

It worked, apparently, with the downside that if you drank it, you got lead poisoning.

I guess you can't have everything.

Mercury was an interesting one.  Mercury-based "medicine" was used to treat leprosy and syphilis in the Middle Ages.  Like the lead/wine-spoilage thing, the medicine worked only in the sense that you died, after which you no longer had leprosy or syphilis.  What the researchers found was that in Italian bones, the greater the socioeconomic status, the higher the likelihood of having mercury in the bone tissue; not, apparently, that the lower classes didn't get syphilis or leprosy, but that they had less access to treatment when they did.  Danish bones, however, showed no such trend.  The availability of medical treatment for the Danes was much more even-handed -- although, as I pointed out, that was not necessarily a good thing.

It's fascinating that we can analyze four-hundred-year-old bones and make some shrewd guesses about the cultural and social context their former owners lived in.  What they had to contend with -- good and bad -- left a clear record in their graves, still discernible four centuries later.

Then there's the second study, which appeared this week in the journal Environmental Hazards.  Entitled "Gulf Coast Parents Speak: Children's Health in the Aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill," by Jaishree Beedasy, Elisaveta Petkova, and Jonathan Sury (of Columbia University), and Stephanie Lackner (of the University of Madrid), the paper describes a study of 720 families in the part of coastal Louisiana hit by the spill, looking particularly at children's health as a function of proximity.  Turns out 60% of parents reported their children having health and/or psychological/emotional problems following exposure, and those who had come into direct physical contact with the spilled oil showed a 4.5 times higher rate of problems than those who had not.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

As the press release about the study in Science Daily put it:

Although natural disasters don't discriminate, they do disproportionately harm vulnerable populations, such as people of color and people with lower incomes.  Children are another vulnerable group, because their coping and cognitive capacities are still developing, and because they depend on caregivers for their medical, social, and educational needs.  A growing body of evidence demonstrates that disasters are associated with severe and long-lasting health impacts for children.

Having just read the story about the Danish and Italian bones, what it immediately got me thinking was, what will future archaeologists say about us when they unearth and analyze our bones?  Will they be able to detect traces of our self-poisoning reliance on fossil fuels?  Will the years from 2016 to 2020 show an uptick in pollutants because of Donald Trump's systematic weakening of environmental protections in favor of zero restrictions on industry and corporate interests?

What will that say to them about our priorities as a society?

Sorry to end on an elegiac note, but since we started with bones buried in cloisters, I suppose it's natural enough.  People eventually wised up to the point that they stopped using lead water intake pipes and cookware, and stopped treating diseases with mercury salts.  They did that, by the way, because of science -- the patient study of cause-and-effect that linked lead and mercury to chronic poisoning.  Let's hope that humanity today starts listening to the scientists today who are warning us about climate change and the health effects of pollution.

Otherwise our distant descendants will make the same judgments of our intelligence as we do of the medievals who put lead compounds in their bottles of wine.

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is for anyone fascinated with astronomy and the possibility of extraterrestrial life: The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World, by Sarah Stewart Johnson.

Johnson is a planetary scientist at Georgetown University, and is also a hell of a writer.  In this book, she describes her personal path to becoming a respected scientist, and the broader search for life on Mars -- starting with simulations in the most hostile environments on Earth, such as the dry valleys of central Antarctica and the salt flats of Australia, and eventually leading to analysis of data from the Mars rovers, looking for any trace of living things past or present.

It's a beautifully-told story, and the whole endeavor is tremendously exciting.  If, like me, you look up at the night sky with awe, and wonder if there's anyone up there looking back your way, then Johnson's book should be on your reading list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Eat like a werewolf

I'm sure that by now all of you have heard of the "Paleo Diet," that claims the path to better health comes from eating like a cave man (or woman, as the case may be) -- consuming only foods that would have been eaten by our distant ancestors living on the African savanna.  The "Paleo Diet," therefore, includes grass-fed meat (cow is okay if you can't find gazelle), eggs, fish, root vegetables, fruits, nuts, and mushrooms.  Not included are dairy products (being that domestication of cattle and goats was post-cave-man), potatoes, salt, sugar, and refined oils.

Despite gaining some traction, especially amongst athletes and bodybuilders, the "Paleo Diet" has been looked upon with a wry eye by actual dieticians.  A survey of experts in the field, sponsored by CNN, placed the "Paleo Diet" as dead last in terms of support from peer-reviewed research and efficacy at promoting healthy weight loss.

But the "Paleo Diet" will sound like quantum physics, technical-science-wise, as compared to the latest diet poised to take the world of poorly-educated woo-woos by storm:

The "Werewolf Diet."

I wish I were making this up.  I also wish, for different reasons, that it was what it sounded like -- that people who sign up find themselves, once a month, sprouting fur and fangs and running around naked and eating unsuspecting hikers. That, at least, would be entertaining.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But no such luck.  The Werewolf Diet, however, does resemble being an actual werewolf in that (1) what you get to eat is tied to the phases of the moon, (2) it more or less ruins your health, and (3) it completely fucks up any chance at a normal social life.

The site "Moon Connection" describes the whole thing in great detail, but they make a big point of their stuff being copyrighted material, so I'll just summarize so that you get the gist:

You have two choices, the "basic plan" or the "extended plan."  On the "basic plan," you fast for 24 hours, either on the full moon or the new moon.  You can, they say, "lose up to six pounds of water weight" by doing this, but why this is a good thing isn't clear.

The "extended plan," though, is more interesting.  With the "extended plan," you fast during the full moon, then eat a fairly normal diet during the waning part of the moon cycle (with the addition of drinking eight glasses of water a day to "flush out toxins").  On the new moon, you should fast again, only consuming dandelion tea or green tea (more toxin flushing).  During the waxing part of the moon cycle, you must be "disciplined" to fight your "food cravings," and avoid overeating.   "Thickeners," such as sugar and fats, should be avoided completely, and you can't eat anything after six PM because that's when the moon's light "becomes more visible."

Then you hit the full moon and it all starts over again.

Well, let me just say that this ranks right up there with "downloadable medicines" as one of the dumbest things I have ever read.  We have the whole "flushing toxins" bullshit -- as if your kidneys and liver aren't capable of dealing with endogenous toxic compounds, having evolved for millions of years to do just that.  We're told, as if it's some sort of revelation, that our "food cravings will increase" after we've been consuming nothing but green tea for 24 hours.  Then we are informed that the moon's gravitational pull has an effect on us, because we're 60% water -- implying that your bloodstream experiences high tide, or something.  But contrary to anything Newton would have had to say about the matter, the gravitational pull the moon exerts upon you somehow depends on the phase it's in, because, apparently, the angle of the light reflecting from the moon's surface, with respect to the position of the Earth, mysteriously alters its mass.

I mean, I'm not a dietician, but really.  And fortunately, there are dieticians who agree.  Keri Gans, a professional dietician and author of "The Small Change Diet," said in an interview, "This diet makes me laugh.  I don’t know if it’s the name or that people will actually believe it.  Either way, it is nothing but another fad diet encouraging restriction.  Restriction of food will of course lead to weight loss, but at what cost to the rest of your body?  If only celebrities, once and for all, would start touting a diet plan that makes sense and is based on science."

Yes.  If only.  But unfortunately, fewer people have heard of Gans, and (evidently) the scientific method, than have heard of Madonna and Demi Moore, who swear by the Werewolf Diet.  Not that Moore, especially, is some kind of pinnacle of rationality; she is a devotee of Philip Berg's "Kabbalah Centre," which preaches that "99% of reality cannot be accessed by the senses."

Nor, apparently, by logic and reason.

Interestingly enough, today is a full moon, meaning that today we're all supposed to be fasting.  To which I answer: the hell you say.  I'm off to get some coffee, bacon, and eggs. Detoxify that, buddy.

******************************

This week's book recommendation is the biography of one of the most inspirational figures in science; the geneticist Barbara McClintock.  A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller not only explains to the reader McClintock's groundbreaking research into how transposable elements ("jumping genes") work, but is a deft portrait of a researcher who refused to accept no for an answer.  McClintock did her work at a time when few women were scientists, and even fewer were mavericks who stood their ground and went against the conventional paradigm of how things are.  McClintock was one -- and eventually found the recognition she deserved for her pioneering work with a Nobel Prize.

Foundations on sand

I try to be polite, but there are times that there really is no reasonable response to a person other than, "I hate to have to point this out, but you're lying."

Surprisingly, I am not talking about either Donald Trump or Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  Even more surprisingly, I'm not referring here to any politician.  I'm referring to a story that I ran into yesterday where people are taking seriously the claim by a Lithuanian woman named Stanislava Monstvilene that she not only has lived on, but has cured her own stage-4 brain tumor with, a diet composed solely of wet sand.

I know I say this a lot, but I wish I was making this up.  Sadly, this is true, and what's worse, there are some natural-diet alternative-medicine types who think this is really (1) possible, and (2) a good idea.  But let Monstvilene speak for herself:

I had a late stage brain tumor.  They said I wouldn’t last long.  My hemoglobin level was 60 [some five times over the normal range].  I was passing by and once an idea came to my mind – take the sand and eat it.  For the first time I choked but then I got used to it.  You should not mix it with food or water.  You should not eat anything else, otherwise you will feel sick.  And the water should not be drunk.  I used to eat wet sand so after it I do not want to drink.

Just reading this makes me want to drink, and I'm not talking about water.  But six AM is a little early for a double scotch, so I'll just soldier on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There is a condition where people feel compelled to eat non-food materials, especially dirt, chalk, stones, hair, and paper.  It's called pica, and is associated with mineral deficiencies, anemia, and mental instability.

And although some of those substances -- particularly dirt and chalk -- are mineral-rich, your body is generally incapable of handling minerals in that form.  Most minerals (such as calcium, iron, zinc, magnesium, cobalt, and so on) that are necessary for health are only absorbed easily if they're chelated -- bonded to an organic compound.  (This is why, for example, zinc supplements are usually in the form of zinc gluconate, and you will not achieve the same effect by chewing on a galvanized nail.)

So pica might result in a compulsion to eat weird stuff, but there's no indication that eating the weird stuff does anything for the underlying condition that caused the pica.

But back to the Sand Lady.  Because she's not just saying she's supplementing her diet with wet sand; she's saying that wet sand is all she eats.  Ever.  (Or drinks.)

To which I respond: bullshit.

Sand, and it pains me even to have to state this, has zero calories.  Most sand is finely ground silica and various types of feldspars (the exactly composition, naturally, depends on the kind of rock the sand was eroded from).  But in no case does sand contain enough nutrients to survive on.

So at the risk of appearing as a scoffer, I'm 100% sure that Ms. Monstvilene is chowing down on sand when the reporters are around, and when no one's looking, she's sneaking out for a cheeseburger with extra mayo.

It's a bit like the couple who claimed to be "Breatharians" (living on nothing but air and the "energy of the universe") and the Seattle woman who said she was going to spend a hundred days "living on light" (this didn't work out so well, as her health deteriorated from the combination of starvation and vitamin deficiency so much that she had to discontinue the stunt on day 47, at which time she had lost 20% of her body weight).

You can't subsist on light and/or dirt for the very good reason that you are not a plant.  Now, I know that loony people make loony claims, kind of by definition.  But that doesn't mean you need to believe them, or necessarily even consider them seriously.  There is enough out there that deserves investigation and is actually scientifically verifiable; last thing we need is to spend our time trying to figure out how some woman in Lithuania is living on a sand diet, when in fact, she is not.

(The irony that in writing this point, I am spending my time addressing this situation, is not lost on me.)

So there you are.  There are times when it is perfectly justifiable to respond "You are talking complete horse waste" to a claim.  Now, you'll have to excuse me, because all of this talk of eating is making me hungry.  Not for dirt, fortunately.  I'm thinking more of bacon and eggs.

The goop returneth

Last week, I described a new product being offered by Gwyneth Paltrow's "alternative health" (i.e. snake oil) company "Goop," namely a "psychic vampire repellent," the advantage of which is you could never be certain if it was effective or not because it's repelling something that doesn't, technically, exist.

Much to my bafflement, instead of laughing directly in Paltrow's face, a significant portion the public is apparently thrilled by her products, so much so that she just announced that she's launching a magazine, also called "goop" (note the e. e. cummings-esque lower case, presumably meant to give the magazine some kind of frisson of daring and insouciance, an impression that is significantly diminished by the fact that it's the word "goop" we're talking about here).

In the first issue, there is a Q-and-A with (surprise!) Paltrow herself, in which she makes some statements that are so ridiculous that I felt impelled to respond to her point-by-point.  It was also to save you the pain of going to her website, which trust me, is a significant favor.

She starts out with a bang.  When asked how she thought to found the company, she said:

[W]hen my dad got sick, I was twenty-six-years-old, and it was the first time that I contemplated that somebody could have autonomy over their health.  So while he was having radiation and the surgery and everything, and eating through a feeding tube, I thought, “Well, I’m pushing this can of processed protein directly into his stomach,” and I remember thinking, “Is this really healing?  This seems weird.  There’s a bunch of chemicals in this shit.”

Well, the reason they were feeding him "processed protein" is that it would be pretty difficult to give someone, say, a tuna sandwich through a feeding tube.  And her final statement, "there's a bunch of chemicals in this shit," is just face-palmingly stupid.  There's a bunch of chemicals in everything.  Because that's what the universe is made of.  Chemicals.  Some of 'em have scary names and are perfectly safe.  Some are natural, 100% organic, and have short, friendly-sounding names, and can kill you.

Like strychnine, for example.  Tell you what: you consume a teaspoon of all-natural strychnine, and I'll consume a teaspoon of highly processed (2R,3S,4S,5R,6R)-2-(hydroxymethyl)-6-[(2R,3S,4R,5R,6S)-4,5,6-trihydroxy-2-(hydroxymethyl)oxan-3-yl]oxy-oxane-3,4,5-triol, and we'll see who's happier in a half-hour.

For you non-chemistry-types, the latter is the chemical name for starch.

Another appalling thing about her statement is that she apparently thinks that her highly scientific analysis of the situation ("there's chemicals in this shit") outweighs the knowledge of all the medical specialists who were, at the time, attempting to save her dad's life.  To me that speaks to a colossal ego issue, on top of simple ignorance.

Then she waxes rhapsodic about a "colon cleanse" she did that made her realize that alt-nutrition stuff was real:

So I was very amped up on the idea of seeing it through to completion.  My best friend did it with me and she ate a banana on the second day, and I was like, “You f%$ked it up.  All results are off.”  I felt very toxic and sluggish and nauseous on the second day, and by the third day I started to feel really good.  And in the book, some people do it for seven days, ten days, thirty days. I was like, “I’m good with the three-day introductory cleanse.”  And I remember the next day, I was like, “Oh wow, I just did this cleanse and I feel so much better, so I can have a beer and a cigarette now, right?”  It was the nineties...  But I do remember feeling that that’s where I caught the bug.  And then the Alejandro Junger cleanse was really instrumental in terms of explaining to me that, especially as detox goes, our bodies are designed to detoxify us, but they were built and designed before fire retardants and PCBs and plastic, so we have a much, much more difficult time, and the body needs some support, which is why cleanses can help.

Which fails to explain why our life expectancy and quality of health is higher now than at any time in recorded history, including back when we were living in a non-fire-retardant world for which our bodies were "built and designed," and had yet to hear about things like "colon cleanses."  Life back then was, as Thomas Hobbes put it, "nasty, poor, brutish, and short," and a significant fraction of people never made it past childhood because of what are now completely preventable diseases.

Oh, wait, many of those diseases are prevented with vaccines, and vaccines contain chemicals.  My bad.

She then goes on to rail a bit against people like me who demand pesky stuff like evidence before I buy into something.  This, Paltrow says, is just thinly-disguised sexism:

I really do think that the most dangerous piece of the pushback is that somewhere the inherent message is, women shouldn’t be asking questions.  So that really bothers me.  I feel it’s part of my mission to say, “We are allowed to ask any question we want to ask.  You might not like the answer, or the answer might be triggering for you.  But we are allowed to ask the question and we are allowed to decide for ourselves what works and what doesn’t work...  They don’t want women asking too many questions. It’s a very misogynistic response.

Funny thing is, we do have a way of asking questions and finding answers, which turn out to be true whether we like them or not: it's called "science."  It gives the same answers whether you're male or female, young or old, and is equally irrespective of race, religion, and ethnic origin.  A great many of we scientist-types would love it if there were more women and minorities in science, and have repeated and loudly decried both the barriers that have kept them out for years, and the terrible waste of talent that represents.

Oh, and "Goop's" anti-vampire sprays and supplements designed to use gem stone energies to realign the frequency of your chakras are not science, because there is not a single shred of evidence that they work, or are even describing anything real.

Sorry, Gwyneth, if that was "triggering for you."

She ends by talking about her vision for what her company is accomplishing:

Our mission is to have a space where curious women can come.  We are creating an opportunity for curiosity and conversation to live...  So, we know that the world follows the consciousness of women.  So we’re just trying to create this environment where, really, women again, can just feel okay about getting close to themselves and working from that place.

Hmm.  Seems to me her mission is to sell completely worthless "alt-med" crap to gullible people in order to make money.

You know, it really doesn't matter to me whether she actually believes what she's saying, or if she is coldly and calculatedly ripping off people who don't understand science.  Her company is selling useless health aids and nutritional supplements wrapped in cosmic-sounding pseudoscience, and in the process hoodwinking people with actual treatable medical conditions into thinking that they can fix their problem by drinking Water Activated With Essence of Sapphire.  So I keep hoping that people will recognize "Goop" for what it is -- yet another in the long, long line of Patent Cure Peddlers.

And that it will, in short order, pass into well-deserved oblivion.

One man's meat

A couple of days ago, my son and I were chatting, and he asked me if I'd ever heard about the concept of "high meat."

I told him I hadn't.  "High meat," he explained, is when people take the probiotic movement one step further, and eat meat and fish that have deliberately been left out until they are thoroughly spoiled.

It is an occupational hazard of writing here at Skeptophilia that occasionally someone will tell me about some damnfool claim, and it turns out they made it up just to see if I'll believe it.  The problem is, having written for seven years about the depths of nonsense to which the human mind can sink, it's hard for me to dismiss any claim out of hand.

After all, any species that can come up with downloadable medicines and homeopathic water is clearly capable of idiocy far beyond anything I could conceive of.

But I figured I'd hedge my bets, especially since my son has a reputation for being a bit of a wiseass at times.  (Can't imagine where he got that from.)  I said, "This is a joke, right?"

He assured me that it wasn't.  So I did some research.  And sure enough: there are back-to-nature types who are so back to nature that they want to recapture what it was like to be a hyena eating carrion in the hot sun of the African savanna.

Don't believe me?  Take a look at this article from the New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger, wherein he visits people who have various takes on the probiotic idea, finally ending up in the home of Steve Torma of Asheville, North Carolina, who has pushed the whole thing to the ultimate.  Torma makes his own "high meat" by letting raw meat or fish decompose in jars.  Then he eats it.  Bilger writes:

Torma ducked into the back of the house and returned with a swing-top jar in his hands. Inside lay a piece of organic beef, badly spoiled.  It was afloat in an ochre-colored puddle of its own decay, the muscle and slime indistinguishable, like a slug.

Even Torma seemed to recognize that it wasn't a very appealing diet.  "The first couple of bites," Torma said, "can be rough going."

There are a variety of other sites where I found out way more about this practice than I ever wanted to know.  The site Local Harvest has directions for preparing "high meat," attributing any resistance we might have to eating said decomposed glop to "prior conditioning."  The Raw Paleo Diet Forum goes into considerable detail about consuming "high meat," and says that if you end up with explosive diarrhea after eating it, not to worry because it's just your body "purging itself of toxins."

Okay, let's see.  Where do I begin?

Cooking, and food preservation strategies in general, caught on primarily because the people who used them were less likely to die of food poisoning.  There are a lot of bacteria out there that would be very happy to make you violently ill -- E. coli, Listeria, Cryptosporidium, and Salmonella come to mind -- and since decomposition happens because of the digestion of organic matter by bacteria, if you eat decomposed food, you are approximately 1,582,614 times more likely to get bacterial food poisoning than the rest of us.

And the symptoms you get are not from the body "purging itself of toxins."  What it is doing is attempting to purge itself of the pathogenic bacteria you were stupid enough to consume.

Consider, too, that we are evolved (not "conditioned") to avoid rotten stuff.  Decomposing meat contains two chemicals -- tetramethylenediamine and pentamethylenediamine -- that are so foul-smelling that their more common names are "putrescine" and "cadaverine," respectively.  Our noses are early-warning systems, giving us valuable information that is essential to our survival.

Including, for example, "Don't eat something that smells like a putrescent cadaver, you fucking moron."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's not that the whole probiotic thing is a bad idea.  Some fermented food -- pickles, sauerkraut, and kimchi, for example -- are fermented with specific strains of bacteria to produce particular flavors and odors.  These bacteria are also chosen on the basis of (1) tasting reasonably good, and (2) not killing you.  (Many of these bacteria are part of a healthy intestinal flora, which has been shown to protect you from diseases like ulcerative colitis and irritable bowel syndrome.)

Eating things that have rotted with your ordinary, garden-variety bacteria, however, is a good way to spend the next few days on a first-name basis with your toilet.  There's a reason we have strict sterilization protocols for food, such as cooking, canning of vegetables, and pasteurization of milk.  It reduces the likelihood of the Bad Guys getting into your digestive tract.  Consider the FDA's stance on pasteurization: "Raw milk is inherently dangerous," their guidelines on dairy safety state.  "It should not be consumed by anyone at any time for any purpose."

So that's unequivocal.

But if you want to try out life as a vulture, have at it.  Me, I'm gonna stick with "low meat," medium-rare, with a large glass of red wine, which not only tastes great but is much less likely to give me horrible bacterial infections.  Call me particular, but I'm just kind of finicky that way.

Acid test

Apparently the most popular fad in alt-med nutrition these days is the so-called "alkaline diet."

The idea here is that lots of diseases -- cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer's are the four most commonly mentioned -- are caused by your body having an "acid pH."  All you have to do, they say, is alter your diet to foods that result in "alkaline ash" (residues with a pH above 7) and you'll be healthy and happy and disease free.  (Here's one example.)

As is the case with most of these sorts of claims, it has a kernel of truth.  There are foods that result in alkaline ash; others that have acidic ash; and some that have neutral (pH = about 7) ash.  The easiest way to monitor this is to test your urine pH, as your kidneys regulate your blood pH by excreting or retaining hydrogen ions, which is what pH is measuring in any case.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Further, a lot of the alkaline ash foods -- fruits and nuts especially -- are certainly part of a healthy diet, and some of the acidic ash foods -- meat, poultry, fish, dairy, grains and alcohol -- are problematic if they make up too great a percentage of your diet.

But that's where the realistic bit ends, and the pseudoscience takes over.

The fact is, you can't change your body's pH, for the very good reason that it's one of the most tightly-regulated homeostatic factors in your body.  Your blood pH is always 7.4.  If it varies more than 0.1 pH points either direction, you are in a world of hurt.  Here's a quick summary of what happens if your blood becomes more acidic:

pH = 7.4 -- happy and healthy
pH = 7.3 -- blood acidosis; symptoms are shortness of breath, headache, confusion
pH = 7.2 -- dead

And the same for moving in the alkaline direction:

pH = 7.4 -- happy and healthy
pH = 7.5 -- blood alkalosis; symptoms are nausea, muscle spasms, twitching, numbness
pH = 7.6 -- dead

So the idea that by eliminating meat from your diet, you'll become more alkaline, and that's somehow healthy, is idiotic.  Each tissue in your body has a particular pH at which it functions best -- some are acidic (e.g. the stomach), some are alkaline (e.g. the blood and the small intestine), and (more importantly) changing that pH in any of them would be a seriously bad idea.

The bottom line is that if our pH yo-yoed around every time we ate a cheeseburger or an apple, we'd be dead.  End of story.

Now, it's true that your urine pH varies a lot; that's because your kidneys are regulating your blood pH by excreting whatever it takes to keep your blood in homeostasis.  So of course your urine pH changes.  It's compensating for what you eat and drink.  But there's nothing healthier about having alkaline urine.  All it means is that your kidneys are working, which is the same thing that having acidic urine means.

The funny thing is, the "alkaline diet" site I linked above gives a nod to that idea in the following paragraph:

Even very tiny alterations in the pH level of various organisms can cause major problems.  For example, due to environmental concerns, such as increasing CO2 deposition, the pH of the ocean has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 and various life forms living in the ocean have greatly suffered.  The pH level is also crucial for growing plants, and therefore it greatly affects the mineral content of the foods we eat.  Minerals in the ocean, soil and human body are used as buffers to maintain optimal pH levels, so when acidity rises, minerals fall.

Right.  So that's why we have kidneys.  So that kind of shift in pH and other electrolytes doesn't kill us.

You'd think that a quick perusal of sites regarding actual research on the effects of diet (here's a good example) would immediately settle that point, but unfortunately the availability of correct information hasn't stopped the claims.  And worse, there are people now selling all sorts of supplements that are supposed to regulate our pH, and without which dire things are predicted to happen.

Me, I'm fond of the dietary advice "everything in moderation."  Listen to your body, make your decisions based on actual research, don't spend your money on useless supplements, and don't go crazy overboard on something like the amazing grapefruit-and-peanut-butter diet.  (I don't know if that actually exists, but given some of the bizarre diets out there, I'll bet it does.)

Best of all, learn a little bit of biology.  It's cool, it's interesting, and it'll keep you from getting suckered by alt-med nonsense.  And with that, I think I'm going to go have some bacon and eggs for breakfast, confident in the knowledge that my kidneys are up to the challenge.

Menu planning by blood type

A few months ago, I wrote about the silly idea that in order to have a happy love life, you need to consider the compatibility of your blood type with that of your prospective romantic interest.  Additionally, your blood type predicts your personality, and what career your should pursue.  My general response:  "As if astrology wasn't ridiculous enough."  (Read my post about it here.) 

Now, to make matters worse, a major magazine has published an article that suggests that your blood type determines what you should eat for dinner.

Last month's issue of Men's Fitness had a piece, in amongst the usual fare featuring weight-lifting tips, bullet points about how to drive your woman crazy in bed, and photographs of shirtless guys with washboard abs, entitled "Eat According to Your Blood Type."  In the introduction to the article, the author, Lauren Passell, writes:

You feel like you’re doing everything right, health-wise. You eat salmon and quinoa, you exercise regularly, you even take the stairs. But if you're still plagued by midday lethargy, digestion issues or just can't lose weight, you might want to take something unorthodox into consideration—your blood type.

According to Dr. Peter J. D’Adamo, author of Eat Right 4 Your Type, whether you’re an A, B, AB or O, your blood type reveals eye-opening things about your personality and your body's needs. Here's what Dr. D'Adamo says about what foods and workouts will help you reach your blood type's fitness goals.

Myself, I think my midday lethargy has nothing to do with my blood type, but more to do with the fact that my dog likes to wake me up at three in the morning because he has an urgent need to play tug-of-war.  But let's see more of what D'Adamo has to say.

Type Os, he claims, are "descended from hunter-gatherers who relied mainly on animal protein to survive their strenuous lifestyles."  He also says that Type O is the "original blood type."

Well, right away, this sent up a couple of red flags.  Aren't we all descended from hunter-gatherers?  It's not like some of us come from proto-hominids in Africa, and others of us come from fruit bats.  And the thing about Type O being the "original blood type" is simply wrong.  The gene that codes for Type O blood is actually a mutated version of the Type A allele -- it has a single-base loss (frameshift mutation) that turns one of the functional codons into a stop code, causing the premature shutoff of translation of the gene and preventing the creation of a functional A antigen.  (The O allele, therefore, produces no functional gene product -- which is why it's recessive.)  The A allele is pretty clearly the oldest of the three ABO blood group alleles.

So this leads us to one important conclusion, to wit: don't make silly claims about genetics, because someone who actually knows something about genetics will call you out on it.

Let's move on, though, because I'm sure you other blood types will want to know what to plan for dinner.

Type As, D'Adamo says, gained the upper hand when agriculture was invented and the "hunter-gatherer Os started thinning out."  If you're Type A, you "have the digestive enzymes and bacteria it takes to digest grains and plants that other blood types might have a rough time breaking down."  Type As should limit red meat and fill their plates with vegetables; the best meal for a Type A is "tofu-pesto lasagna."  Type As also tend to have digestive upsets because they're "Type A personalities."  (I want you to appreciate how hard it was for me to write that last sentence without doing a faceplant directly into my keyboard.)

 Type Bs, on the other hand, "emerged when type Os moved to the Himalayas as nomads, domesticating animals and living on meat and dairy."  He did get one thing right, here, in the manner of a monkey pounding on a typewriter and eventually spelling out a real word; Type B blood has its peak frequency in India.  Otherwise, however, he's pretty much batting zero, because he says that Type Bs need lots of dairy products "because of a sugar present in milk," conveniently ignoring the fact that Type B is very common in East Asia, where the vast majority of people are also genetically lactose intolerant.

Oops.

Type ABs, "the newest blood type," combine the characteristics of A and B (no surprise).  Their "low stomach acid" makes them "store meat as fat," so they need to eat lots of eggs.    I swear, I didn't make that claim up.  Go to the article, which I've linked above, if you don't believe me.

What appalls me most about this is not that D'Adamo wrote a book.  In these days of e-publishing, any yahoo with a computer can write a book.  (Note my links on the right side of the page.)  What bothers me is that a major magazine actually published this article, never once asking the critical question, "What is your evidence for all of this?"  (Not to mention the more important question, "Where did you get your medical degree?  Online Diplomas 'R' Us?")  The problem is, a lot of people don't think of questioning something that is written by a guy with "Dr." in front of his name, especially those of us who don't have a great background in science.  After all, the target readership of Men's Fitness is not scientists; it's just guys who would like to tone up and slim down (and drive their women crazy in bed).  So I'm sure after this issue came out, you had loads of very earnest guys going through their fridges and making sure that their food was in line with their blood type, instead of doing the simple thing that all of us should do, which is to eat a balanced diet and get plenty of exercise.  But of course, "eat a balanced diet and get plenty of exercise" isn't the kind of advice that sells books, or lands your ideas a national forum in a men's health magazine.

So, the bottom line; D'Adamo's claims are total horse waste.  Myself, I'm glad, because I'm a Type A, and I'll be damned if I'm going to give up my t-bone steaks for "tofu-pesto lasagna."