SaluGenecists Science Blog

Here’s an interesting resource I just found this week: CSPC. It is a database of cosmetic ingredients known to cause harm in humans. There is also an online reporting area.

Personally, I believe that there is so much noise in the conversation about toxins in the environment that it gets hard to hear the true signal (signal to noise ratio is radio engineering lingo for you young-’uns). This link is pure signal, no noise.

Thanks to the Breast Cancer Resource Center of Tacoma for bringing this one to my attention.

The conversation about keeping U.S. health care costs under control has oscillated from maddeningly vague to absurdly detailed, but with no real plan emerging. The main reason for this, I believe, is that whenever the topic of cost control comes up, industry (pharma, hospitals, physicians, etc) starts to holler about rationing.

I’m about to say something really controversial here: a little rationing would probably be a good thing in many ways. Let me give an example.

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Out here in the Pacific Northwest, most of our grocery chains have set up a section for “health food” - a couple of aisles with packaged foods, frozen items, green cleaning products, etc. Because every store I go in seems to be adopting this strategy, I have no doubt about whether this is a lucrative idea. But here’s the catch, many of the things in this “health food” aisle aren’t too healthy.

For the most part, my complaints aren’t all that sophisticated. Many of the low-fat packaged foods replace the lost flavor with extra salt. Organic frozen packaged foods are nearly as nutritionally bereft as their conventionally-grown counterparts. 

But then there’s this.  I see this product in pretty much every grocery story I go to (and I’ve got about 5 in heavy rotation). It is made from a soil fungus noted for its toxicity. I have been aware of complaints from consumers for nearly a decade, and pretty much since it came on the market. And it is still being sold as a health-food alternative to eating meat.

I’ve been a vegetarian for more than 15 years, and I’d probably still rather have fast-food hamburgers before eating soil fungus burgers.

I rented a DVD over the weekend called Beautiful Truth. It caught my eye because it claimed to be the story of the Gerson Therapy for cancer, a treatment that has been in and out of favor in CAM practice for over 50 years.

Instead, the film turned into a grab bag of hot button issues in modern health - vaccines, amalgams, GMO foods, etc. Watching this stuff unfold on the same day as the march on Washington by opponents of the health care bill, I was struck by just how cynical Americans have become.

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According to a new study published by PLoS Medicine (a new online journal that is likely to end up in my regular rotation), less than half of the registered clinical trials in America over the past decade went unpublished. The trials sponsored by industry were the least likely ever to end up on the shelves.

This new research trial was elegant in its simplicity. The authors surveyed the clinicaltrials.gov website for all registered clinical trials between 1999 and 2007. Of these, they took a randomized subset of 10% of the 7515 total research trials. After eliminating incomplete trials and CAM studies (!), they were left with 677 data points.

Of these 677 trials, only 311 (or 46%) had been published. Of the studies sponsored by industry, only 40% had been published.

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A new report presented at the Military Health Research Forum shows that fighter pilot performance and mental acuity is superior on a high-carb or high-fat diet when compared to a high-protein intervention. This challenges the claims of many in the low-carb diet fad world who claim that high-protein diets improve mental function.

According to news reports, the researchers compared the results on standardized tests of neurological function after four day dietary interventions. Diets were matched for caloric intake and micronutrient content. Flight performance, sleep, and memory were all significantly worse after the high-protein intervention than after other dietary interventions.

This is hardly a definitive study. The group surveyed is likely to be much more intelligent and much better physically conditioned than the average American population. It may be that less extreme outliers may not see the subtle differences in function as acutely. Still, it is hard to see how these results could be consistent with a hypothesis that high-protein improves performance.

My former students know that there are few dietary fads that I take more delight in debunking than the protein faddists, so this news makes my week. I hope the authors publish their results in a peer-reviewed journal soon so the rest of the world can see them.