The case for tougher rats.

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Chairman Bill, in a comment to the last post, deemed hydrogenated fats to be carcinogens.

While I took some issue with the broadness of the statement, I do agree in a broader sense.

At a different level, I believe EVERYTHING causes cancer. You just need more of some things than others.

In a broad sense cancers occur when the body's systems are overwhelmed by a particular compound or radiation. Even shift work is implicated in cancers nowadays. It is a case of the body getting swamped in someway and losing the plot when it comes to cell growth.

Tests in the labs have shown that if you swamp a lab rat's diet with a chemicals it will develop cancers but, in order to speed up the process the labs feed the rats enormous amount of the compound being tested. If you want to see what they went through, make a mix of a food of your choice and include 5% saccharin. Inedible. Now do it all meals for an extended time. Unbearable. No wonder the poor rat developed cancer. But how does swamping a rat's genetic processes translate into the long term effect of low levels of a saccharin on humans?

Bill talked about trans fats in margarines but they are naturally occurring in most fats.

In low levels.

It is generally accepted that smoking causes cancer; this is due to the compounds in the tars. Theoretically these compounds are first cousins of the charring of any plant matter. Smoking marijuana is just as dangerous as tobacco in this sense - different psychoactive substances, same tar.

But burnt plant matter is common in our diet - browned meat, roasted coffee, toast, cakes, biscuits, fries/chips. All theoretically foreign and carcinogens.

I argue that all chemicals, taken in excess for extended time will swamp the system.

I also argue that the system is designed to cope with a multitude of chemicals that are naturally in our food. The analogy would be sand. If I drop a stream of sand on your shoulder, it will bounce off and not be a problem. If I drop a ton of sand on you all at once, it is a big problem.

It is all a matter of recognising and managing risk.
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Margarine & Butter

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Sara asked for a run down on Margarine.

Normally the image sold to us with margarine is like the one above.

Mother Nature at her most adorable best.

In reality, canola seeds, the main source of oil for most domestic margarine and a close relative of rapeseed and mustard seed, looks like this:

Wholemeal margarine

For convenience, I will limit myself to the manufacturing steps to make canola-based margarines. The process is largely as follows:

1. Grind the seeds and extract the oil using petroleum solvent, usually hexane. Remove as much as possible of the hexane from the oil. The oil at this stage is a greeny-brown colour and has a nutty odour.

2. Treat the oil with caustic soda to neutralise free acids and precipitate gums.

3. Heat the oil with clay to bleach it to a pale yellow colour.

4. Deodorise the oil to remove unpleasant tastes and smells – this is usually done with steam and vacuum.

At this point you have vegetable oil, as you would buy it in the shops. Now...

5. Heat the oil under pressure and heat with finely divided nickel and hydrogen gas to saturate the double and triple bonds in the oil and create a fat that is solid at room temperature. Attempt to minimise the production of trans fats while doing this. The product is now solid, white and bland.

6. Add about 20% water or milk plus emulsifier (typically lecithin) to keep the water-oil suspension stable.

7. Add flavours (usually milk and/or milk solids) to give taste. Salt may also be added.

8. Add vitamins A & D to fortify it.

9. Add colour to make it look more appealing.

10. Put a lid on it.

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Margarine has the same fat content (80-85%) as butter.

Margarine has the same calories as butter.

Margarine use was widely adopted when someone said butter was bad. No-one stopped to wonder if margarine was good. It just wasn't butter and butter was bad. Presumably butter was bad because it contained cholesterol. Now the notion that dietary cholesterol is a problem has been largely discredited. The concern now centres on the saturated fats in the diet.

Butter does have higher saturated fat levels than margarine.

The other thing to be aware of is that there is table margarine and cooking margarine. Cooking margarine is used in the biscuit and cake industry and is a harder (more saturated) fat than table margarine.

Is margarine bad?
No, not bad in the 'avoid at all costs' sense but nor is it 'natural' in the way the advertisers and their sunny yellow fields would like us to believe.
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Locked away in a room full of celery...

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I used to be intrigued by a story I was told as a kid, that hard boiled eggs use more energy to digest than they contain and so you loose weight if you eat them.

Sounded dodgy to me, even then. It implied that if you were locked in a room with nothing but water and hard boiled eggs, you would starve to death.

But apparently that is the case with celery.

The calories in food are a measure of energy content. For something we eat to be a source of "negative calories," it must provide fewer of these units of energy than we expend in consuming it. Yet everything contains calories, so at first this concept appears impossible.

Therefore, the hunt is on for ingestibles whose energy content is not released into our bodies because we humans lack the ability to break them down — it doesn't matter how many calories these goodies have, provided we can't extract them.

Cellulose in plants is one such substance: although it contains a goodly amount of carbohydrates, they are packaged in a form we cannot digest, so we fail to absorb their calories.

Celery has about 6 calories per 8-inch stalk, making it a dieter's staple.

Its ingestion can result in negative calories, but it is a fallacy to believe that effect has to do with energy expended in chewing. Though chewing might feel like a somewhat strenuous activity, it burns about the same amount of energy as watching paint dry. It is the bodily energy devoted to the digestion of the green stalks that exhausts calories.
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It's not the apples inside him, it's the alcohol in cider.

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WARSAW - A Polish lawmaker who failed a drink-driving test said
he had eaten too many apples, the website of daily Gazeta Wyborcza said Monday.

Asked why a traffic police check Sunday showed he had 0.7 units of alcohol in his blood, Marek Latas denied having drunk alcohol that day.

"I am diabetic, I ate a few apples before driving.

"I have been involved in no accident, I underwent a routine roadside check. I was confident there was no chance I had alcohol in my blood," said Latas, a member of parliament for the conservative opposition Law and Justice Party. The prosecutor's office is investigating his case, the website said. In Poland, the legal limit for alcohol when driving is 0.2 units.

- Reuters

Cute story. Could it be true?

Assuming their alcohol limit is 0.05% (I don't understand 'units', that usually refers to drinks consumed.), the guy had a level of three and a half times that: 0.175%.

As a rule of thumb you blood alcohol level goes up by 0.01% per standard drink and down by 0.01% per hour. That blood level is equivalent to about 20 drinks over, say, three hours.

That's about 5 litres of 'liquor', requiring the juice of about three dozen apples.

Not only do you need to eat 36 apples, you need to retain them in your stomach for 3-6 days.

Not only do you need to retain them in your stomach for 3-6 days you need a yeast that will live in there. A stomach is about 100 times more acidic than the normal cider fermentation process. You need a super yeast and you need to be able to deal with a lot of released gas from the fermentation process. (burp).

And all that assumes that his liver is not metabolising the alcohol as it is produced.

Guilty as charged, I fear.

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Ah, now I see!

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A Sydney doctor has been studying human retinas since 1976 and says the carrot myth, that eating carrots is good for your eyes, started in World War II, is a "complete fabrication". Dr Beaumont is the director of the Macular Degeneration (MD) Foundation.

"When the English ... were flying at night they used radar but the Germans didn't know that radar existed," Dr Beaumont said from his Sydney clinic. "The English certainly didn't want them to know so they put out a myth saying they were feeding their pilots carrots to improve their night vision and that's why they could fly and see things at night.

Dr Beaumont recommends eating lutein rich foods for eye health. The lutein (found in spinach, corn and egg yolks) helps protect the eye from sight-damaging light that causes MD and blindness, Dr Beaumont explains.

On the flipside, ironically, foods rich in beta carotene - like carrots - can damage the eye's protective shield, doubling your risk of contracting the disease.

So much for old wive's tales.

Related to that, there is at least one recorded case of a person dying from drinking excessive amounts of carrot juice.

While we need Vitamin A (beta carotene is a Vitamin A precursor), it is actually quite toxic.
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Prostate Cancer and Red Wine

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The Australian media was abuzz last week with a report that alcohol consumption increases the chances of prostate cancer. Two drinks a day will increase your risk by 20%. The risk increased with the number of drinks consumed in a day.

Before I pour my home brew down the drain, there are a few things I need answered.
(If you haven't read my previous post, now's a good time. I'll wait.)

Causality
Could alcohol consumption cause/increase the risk of prostate cancer? Possible.
Could prostate cancer risk cause drinking? Improbable.
Could a third factor be in play? Possible. Here are a few possible other factors:

People who drink large amounts of alcohol a day are often overweight. Is BMI a factor?
The consumption of chips, nuts and snack foods is probably proportional to drinks consumed.
Big drinkers often eat more meat.
Is consumption of other foods an issue - fibre, greens, fruit?
Do drinkers live longer, due to the heart benefits of alcohol, and get cancer due to longevity?

That will do. I'm sure we could come up with more. You can begin to see the difficulty of extracting two issues from a very complex life-matrix.

Crud Factor
Is a crud factor in play? Possibly. Sometimes a big survey like this finds statistical significance where no practical significance exists or will average out differences in reports.

Compare the following two extracts from studies into prostate cancer and alcohol consumption:

Our present study suggests that consumption of beer or liquor is not associated with prostate cancer. There may be, however, a reduced relative risk associated with increasing level of red wine consumption. Int. J. Cancer: 113, 133–140 (2005).

Wine or beer consumption was unassociated with prostate cancer; however, moderate liquor consumption was associated with a significant 61–67% increased risk of prostate cancer. International Journal of Epidemiology 2001;30:749-755

Looks as if beer is neutral, red wine gets a sort of a plus and spirits get a sort of a minus.

So does the report mean anything?

Too early to tell really but I will put a punt on the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption outweighing the possible down side.
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Of sharks and ice-creams...

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Really this post is about statistics but you wouldn't have come if I had said that.

The thing is that there are reports published everyday on every possible subject, many of them food and health linked. My next post, which prompted this pre-post, is on prostate cancer and red wine. I am doing this post separately as I think I will be referring to it time and time again.

Newspapers happily publish these 'shock-horror' health reports, edited, cherry-picked, sensationalised and often unverified.

Readers, knowing no better, accept them on face value.

To help me explain, let me now call on some sharks and ice-creams.

Sharks & Ice Creams - the pursuit of causality.
There has been shown to be a strong correlation between shark attacks and ice-cream consumption in Australia.

Does that mean eating ice-creams make you more prone to being eaten by a shark?

Does it mean that, having been attacked by a shark, you start craving dairy food?

Or could it possibly be that a third thing, maybe the season, is controlling both things?

Indeed it is the case that it is in summer that both shark attacks and ice-cream consumption increase.

Independently.

Causality is fundamental to interpreting any report. What caused what? Whenever you see a report in the papers linking two things, ask yourself the following three questions:

• Is A really causing B, as claimed?
• Could B actually be causing A?
• Could something else, C, be causing both A and B?

The Crud Factor
The crud factor in statistics is an acknowledgement that everything is correlated.

If I was to find the data for tin production in Bolivia for the last ten years and also find the number of deaths in bicycle accidents in Belgium over the same period and plot them on an X-Y graph there would almost certainly be a correlation between the two.

A chance correlation.

It may be negative, it may be positive, it may be big or small, but it is most unlikely to be zero.

That is why all scientific research needs to be replicated; scientists test the same hypothesis (that tin production in Bolivia is impacting on bicycle fatalities in Belgium) using different data. If they can replicate the results then their confidence in the hypothesis increases.

It is not uncommon for replicate testing to fail to reproduce the original work.

Sadly, journal editors are not as keen to publish a negative result as they are to publish a positive and interesting one and such work often never gets beyond the waste bin. And, should they publish an article negating previous work, news media are far less likely to run it because it is not "news" and not shocking enough.

Summary
So, if there is a news item showcasing some horror relationship between a food and health or even some wonder cure, be ready to ask yourself if the implied causality makes sense and could it just be a chance correlation.

There you go. That didn't hurt, did it?
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