Category: Health

“It’s Our Right to Choose What We Want to Put in Our Bodies”

FoodSovereigntySign2011-08-06.jpg “Protesters outside the Los Angeles Courthouse on Thursday denounced the police’s moves against Rawesome, which offers raw milk products.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

LOS ANGELES — Raw food enthusiasts fit right in here, in the earthy, health-conscious beach communities of Venice and Santa Monica, along with the farmers’ markets, health food stores and vegan restaurants.

But this week, the police cleared the shelves of Rawesome, an establishment in Venice Beach, loading $70,000 of raw, organic produce and dairy products on the back of a flatbed truck.
And then, on Thursday, James Stewart, the proprietor, was arraigned on charges of illegally making, improperly labeling and illegally selling raw milk products, as well as other charges related to Rawesome’s operations. Two farmers who work with Rawesome were also named in the district attorney’s complaint.
. . .
The raid on Rawesome has riled people here who say that unpasteurized milk is safer and healthier. About 150 raw food advocates gathered at the Los Angeles County Courthouse on Thursday to oppose the crackdown.
“It’s our right to choose what we want to put in our bodies,” Ms. Buttery said. “When members filled out an application, they were saying they wanted natural bacteria in their systems. We don’t want labeling. We don’t want animals full of antibiotics.”

For the full story, see:
IAN LOVETT. “Raw Food Co-op Is Raided in California.” The New York Times (Fri., August 5, 2011): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated August 4, 2011.)

The Lancet Accused Snow of Being “in the Pocket of Business Interests”

(p. 365) It is hard now to appreciate just how radical and unwelcome Snow’s views were. Many authorities actively detested him for them. The Lancet concluded that he was in the pocket of business interests which wished to continue to fill the air with ‘pestilent vapours, miasms and loathsome abominations of every kind’ and make themselves rich by poisoning their neighbours. ‘After careful enquiry,’ the parliamentary inquiry concluded, ‘we see no reason to adopt this belief.’

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

In Middle Ages “Nearly Everyone Itched Nearly All the Time”

(p. 346) . . . in the Middle Ages the spread of plague made people consider more closely their attitude to hygiene and what they might do to modify their own susceptibility to outbreaks. Unfortunately, people everywhere came to exactly the wrong conclusion. All the best minds agreed that bathing opened the epidermal pores and encouraged deathly vapours to invade the body. The best policy was to plug the pores with dirt. For the next six hundred years most people didn’t wash, or even get wet, if they could help it – and in consequence they paid an uncomfortable price. Infections became part of everyday life. Boils grew commonplace. Rashes and blotches were routine. Nearly everyone itched nearly all the time. Discomfort was constant, serious illness accepted with resignation.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

McKinsey Finds 30% of Employers Will Drop Health Coverage in Response to Obamacare

McKinsey is probably the best known business consulting and forecasting firm in the United States. Many well-known management gurus, and corporate executives, have spent time working for McKinsey (as did Chelsea Clinton). One of their senior partners (Foster) co-authored a useful book called Creative Destruction.

(p. A2) A report by McKinsey & Co. has found that 30% of employers are likely to stop offering workers health insurance after the bulk of the Obama administration’s health overhaul takes effect in 2014.
. . .
Previous research has suggested the number of employers who opt to drop coverage altogether in 2014 would be minimal.
But the McKinsey study predicts a more dramatic shift from employer-sponsored health plans once the new marketplace takes effect. Starting in 2014, all but the smallest employers will be required to provide insurance or pay a fine, while most Americans will have to carry coverage or pay a different fine. Lower earners will get subsidies to help them pay for plans.
In surveying 1,300 employers earlier this year, McKinsey found that 30% said they would “definitely or probably” stop offering employer coverage in the years after 2014. That figure increased to more than 50% among employers with a high awareness of the overhaul law.

For the full story, see:
JANET ADAMY. “Study Sees Cuts to Health Plans.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., JUNE 8, 2011): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The Foster book is:
Foster, Richard N., and Sarah Kaplan. Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market—and How to Successfully Transform Them. New York: Currency Books, 2001.

Coralville Police Close 4-Year-Old Abigail’s Lemonade Stand

(p. 2B) CORALVILLE — Police closed down a lemonade stand in Coralville, telling its 4-year-old operator and her dad that she didn’t have a permit.
. . .
Abigail’s dad, Dustin Krutsinger, said the ordinance and its enforcers are going too far if they force a 4-year-old to abandon her lemonade stand.

For the full story, see:
AP. “Coralville shuts down girl’s lemonade stand.” Omaha World-Herald [Iowa Edition] (Weds., August 3, 2011): 2B.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 2, 2011 and has the title “Girl’s lemonade stand shut down.”)

The next day, the Iowa Edition of the Omaha World-Herald ran an update:

(p. 2B) CORALVILLE — Four-year-old Abigail Krutsinger wasn’t the only lemonade stand operator who was closed down when RAGBRAI bicyclists poured into Coralville last week.

At least three stands run by children were closed down because they hadn’t obtained permits and health inspections.

For the full story, see:
AP. “Coralville defends closing kids’ stands.” Omaha World-Herald [Iowa Edition] (Thurs., August 4, 2011): 2B.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 3, 2011, and has the title “More lemonade stands shuttered.”)

John Crandon Proved Scurvy Caused by Lack of Vitamin C

(p. 167) . . . , in 1939 a Harvard Medical School surgeon named John Crandon decided to settle matters once and for all by the age-old method of withholding Vitamin C from his diet for as long as it took to make himself really ill. It took a surprisingly long time. For the first eighteen weeks, his only symptom was extreme fatigue. (Remarkably, he continued to operate on patients throughout this period.) But in the nineteenth week he took an abrupt turn for the worse – so much so that he would almost certainly have died had he not been under close medical supervision. He was injected with 1,000 milligrams of Vitamin C and was restored to life (p. 168) almost at once. Interestingly, he had never acquired the one set of symptoms that everyone associates with scurvy: the falling out of teeth and bleeding of gums.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Study Finds No Link Between Cellphones and Cancer

(p. A3) A European study involving nearly 1,000 participants has found no link between cellular-phone use and brain tumors in children and adolescents, a group that may be particularly sensitive to phone emissions.

The study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, was prompted by concerns that the brains of younger users may be more vulnerable to adverse health effects–such as cancer–from cellphones.

For the full story, see:
GAUTAM NAIK. “Study Sees No Cellphone-Cancer Ties.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., July 28, 2011): A3.

Obstacles to Curing Scurvy: A Deadly Experiment and Putting Theory Before Evidence

(p. 165) What was needed was some kind of distilled essence – an antiscorbutic, as the medical men termed it – that would be effective against scurvy but portable too. In the 1760s, a Scottish doctor named William Stark, evidently encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, conducted a series of patently foolhardy experiments in which he tried (p. 166) to identify the active agent by, somewhat bizarrely, depriving himself of it. For weeks he lived on only the most basic of foods – bread and water chiefly – to see what would happen. What happened was that in just over six months he killed himself, from scurvy, without coming to any helpful conclusions at all.
In roughly the same period, James Lind, a naval surgeon, conducted a more scientifically rigorous (and personally less risky) experiment by finding twelve sailors who had scurvy already, dividing them into pairs, and giving each pair a different putative elixir – vinegar to one, garlic and mustard to another, oranges and lemons to a third, and so on. Five of the groups showed no improvement, but the pair given oranges and lemons made a swift and total recovery. Amazingly, Lind decided to ignore the significance of the result and doggedly stuck with his personal belief that scurvy was caused by incompletely digested food building up toxins within the body.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

The Victimless Crime of Selling Rice Wine

IllegalRiceWine2011-08-07.jpg “Illegal rice wine for sale in Chinatown. The wine is popular among immigrants from Fujian Province.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A22) The restaurant looks like so many others in the roiling heart of Chinatown, in Lower Manhattan: a garish sign in Chinese and English, slapdash photos of featured dishes taped to the windows, and extended Chinese families crowding around tables, digging into communal plates of steamed fish, fried tofu and sautéed watercress.

But ask a waitress the right question and she will disappear into the back, returning with shot glasses and something not on the menu: a suspiciously unmarked plastic container containing a reddish liquid.
It is homemade rice wine — “Chinatown’s best,” the restaurant owner asserts. It is also illegal.
In the city’s Chinese enclaves, there is a booming black market for homemade rice wine, representing one of the more curious outbreaks of bootlegging in the city since Prohibition. The growth reflects a stark change in the longstanding pattern of immigration from China.
In recent years, as immigration from the coastal province of Fujian has surged, the Fujianese population has come to dominate the Chinatowns of Lower Manhattan and Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and has increased rapidly in other Chinese enclaves like the one in Flushing, Queens.
These newcomers have brought with them a robust tradition of making — and hawking — homemade rice wine. In these Fujianese neighborhoods, right under the noses of the authorities, restaurateurs brew rice wine in their kitchens and sell it proudly to customers. Vendors openly sell it on street corners, and quart-size containers of it are stacked in plain view in grocery store refrigerators, alongside other delicacies like jellyfish and duck eggs.
The sale of homemade rice wine — which is typically between 10 and 18 percent alcohol, about the same as wine from grapes — violates a host of local, state and federal laws that govern the commercial production and sale of alcohol, but the authorities have apparently not cracked down on it.

For the full story, see:
KIRK SEMPLE and JEFFREY E. SINGER. “Illegal Sale of Rice Wine Thrives in Chinese Enclaves.” The New York Times (Weds., July 20, 2011): A22-A23.
(Note: the online version of the story is dated July 19, 2011.)

Drug from David Sinclair’s Sirtris Start-Up Lengthens Life of Obese Mice

MiceLiveLonger2011-08-19.jpg“An obese mouse given the drug SRT-1720, center, and one not given the drug, right.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) Sustaining the flickering hope that human aging might somehow be decelerated, researchers have found they can substantially extend the average life span of obese mice with a specially designed drug.

The drug, SRT-1720, protects the mice from the usual diseases of obesity by reducing the amount of fat in the liver and increasing sensitivity to insulin. These and other positive health effects enable the obese mice to live 44 percent longer, on average, than obese mice that did not receive the drug, according to a team of researchers led by Rafael de Cabo, a gerontologist at the National Institute on Aging.
Drugs closely related to SRT-1720 are now undergoing clinical trials in humans.
The findings “demonstrate for the first time the feasibility of designing novel molecules that are safe and effective in promoting longevity and preventing multiple age-related diseases in mammals,” Dr. de Cabo and colleagues write in Thursday’s issue of the new journal Scientific Reports. Their conclusion supports claims that had been thrown in doubt by an earlier study that was critical of SRT-1720.
A drug that makes it cost-free to be obese may seem more a moral hazard than an incentive to good health. But the rationale behind the research is somewhat different: the researchers are trying to capture the benefits that allow mice on very low-calorie diets to live longer. It just so happens that such benefits are much easier to demonstrate in mice under physiological stress like obesity than in normal mice.
. . .
. . . , a small pharmaceutical concern in Cambridge, Mass., designed SRT-1720 and a set of similar drugs to mimic resveratrol — the trace ingredient of red wine that is thought to activate protective proteins called sirtuins.
The sirtuins help bring about the 30 percent extension of life span enjoyed by mice and rats that are kept on very low-calorie diets.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “Longer Lives for Obese Mice, With Hope for Humans of All Sizes.” The New York Times (Fri., August 19, 2011): A1 & A3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was dated August 18, 2011.)