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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Toxic waste

If there's one word related to health issues that makes me cringe, it's the word "toxin."

This term gets thrown around all the time.  I was given a gift card for a massage for my last birthday (which was wonderful, by the way), and afterwards, the masseuse told me that I needed to drink lots of water that day because the massage had "loosened up toxins" and I needed to drink a lot to "flush them from my system."  Just a couple of weeks ago, I was buying some fresh turmeric root at a local organic grocery, and a lady smiled at me in a friendly sort of way, and said, "Oooh, turmeric!  It's wonderful at detoxifying the body!"

What gets me about the use of "toxin" and "detoxify" is that the people who use those terms so seldom have any idea about what particular toxins they're talking about.  If I was just a wee bit more obnoxious than I am -- an eventuality no one should wish for -- I would have said to the masseuse and the lady in the grocery, "Can you name one specific chemical that massage and/or turmeric releases in my body that I need to be concerned about?"

Chances are, of course, they would not have been able to; even in supposedly informative articles in health magazines, they're just lumped together as "toxins."  The word has become a stand-in for unspecified "really bad stuff" that we need to fret about even though no one seems all that sure what it is.

And then buy whatever silly detox remedy the writer of the article suggests.

This all comes up because of an article I read in Science-Based Medicine called "Activated Charcoal: The Latest Detox Fad in an Obsessive Food Culture," by Scott Gavura.  In it, we hear about people dosing themselves with activated charcoal as a "detox" or "cleanse," because evidently our liver and kidneys -- evolved over millions of years to deal with all sorts of unpleasant metabolic wastes -- are insufficient to protect us.

No, you need "activated charcoal lemonade."

I wish I was making this up, but no.  People actually are adding gritty, pitch-black charcoal to their lemonade, in order to make it "soak up toxins."

The problem here, as Gavura points out, is that activated charcoal is used in detoxification, so there's that kernel of truth in all of the nonsense.  Actual detoxification, I mean, not this pseudoscientific fad-medicine horseshit; detoxification of the sort done in cases of poisoning.  I know this first hand, because of an incident involving a border collie named Doolin that we once had.  My wife and I had visited northern California, and dropped by the wonderful Mendocino Chocolate Company, makers of what are clearly the best chocolate truffles in the entire world.  We bought a dozen truffles of various sorts and brought them home with us, babying them through our travels during high summer.  We got them home successfully, and on the first day back...

... Doolin pulled the box off the counter and ate all twelve chocolate truffles.

As you undoubtedly know, chocolate is highly poisonous to dogs, so off Doolin went to the vet to get a (real) detoxification.  One of the things they did was feed her activated charcoal.  We found this out because on the way back home from the vet, Doolin puked up charcoal all over the back seat of my wife's brand-new Mini Cooper.

Doolin survived the chocolate incident, although she almost didn't survive our reaction to (1) the thousand-dollar vet bill, (2) black doggie puke all over the new car upholstery, and worst of all, (3) not getting our chocolates.  But she went on to live another six healthy years, thanks to modern veterinary science.

But I digress.

So charcoal does have its uses.  But you're not accomplishing anything by adding it to lemonade, except perhaps (as Gavura writes) having the charcoal absorb nutrients from your digestive tract, making whatever food you're eating less nutritious.  Because charcoal, of course, isn't selective about what it absorbs -- it'll absorb damn near anything, including vitamins and other essential nutrients.

Facts don't seem to matter much to the alt-med crowd, however, and now there's charcoal everywhere.  Over at the webzine Into the Gloss, writer Victoria Lewis tells us about taste-testing a bunch of different charcoal drinks, and her analysis includes the following insightful paragraph about "Juice Generation Activated Greens":

I decided to drink this ultra-vegetable-filled (kale, spinach, celery, parsley, romaine, and cucumber) juice for breakfast. It tasted exactly like a super green juice—a little salty but otherwise, totally normal. I did end up eating some granola afterwards (juice diets have never been for me), but this one felt good and extremely healthy.

Which, right there, sums up the whole approach.  Screw medical research; if consuming some weird new supplement "feels good and extremely healthy," then it must be getting rid of all those bad old toxins, or something, even if it tastes like vaguely lemon-flavored fireplace scrapings.  It's all about the buzzwords, the hype, and the feelings -- not about anything remotely related to hard evidence.

But of course, since now we have renowned nutritionalists like Gwyneth Paltrow getting on board, the whole "charcoal juice cleanse" thing is going to take off amongst people with more money than sense.

Makes me feel like I need to go eat some bacon and eggs, just to restore order to the universe.