Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

There is a system in your body that feels like an infection. There may also be bacteria in your body that constitute a literal infection, causing this phenomenon. Modern biology is still not entirely clear on the facts. But what's important is how it feels.

There is an alien mind lurking behind your own. It's a collective of little minds. It wants sugar. Simple fast-acting sugar; the kind that it can snatch up out of your bloodstream before your body can use or store it all. This alien mind reaches around your own and pokes the controls of your body, making you want sugar. The effect is sometimes overt and pictures of ice cream and soda flash directly into your mind, and other times the effect is subtle and you look down at what you're eating and realize that it contains a large portion of sugar, even though you deliberately chose it as an alternative to something with sugar in it. You thought you were doing good, but you tricked yourself. You are infected.

As long as you keep constantly eating sugar that you don't need, that alien mind is strong. When the sugar starts to dry up, it will lean hard on the controls. The craving can become unbearable, but it helps to realize that the craving is not your own voice but that of an alien, occupying your body, soaking up sugar and demanding more, even though such large amounts are damaging to all the systems of your body.

Defy it. Stop eating the sugar completely, for an entire week. The alien will scream and smash at the controls, and just after the cravings feel the worst, the bastard will start to die. Imagine little corpses falling into your bloodstream, being gathered up by your organs and dumped out, like the diseased aliens at the end of War Of The Worlds. Picture them as little foreign bacteria, or little bits of fungus, or tiny shrieking insects; whatever suits your imagination. That's what it's like, being addicted to sugar.

Fight the infection!

I while ago I had the privilege of attending the 11th International Conference of the Metabolomics Society. When I wasn't doing interviews I wandered around and had fun reading the presentation posters. Here's some neat stuff I saw:



This is a graph of the "Carlson Curve", a kind of genetics equivalent of Moore's Law. The connection illustrated in the graph isn't entirely sensible, since Moore's Law isn't actually about dollar cost, but about information density. It gets the point across though.



Did you know that your brain swells when you're asleep?

Perhaps this is why your head feels fuzzy when someone wakes you up too soon.

P.S.: I bet you've never heard of the Glymphatic System eh? Check it out.



Breaking scientific insight! Japanese women tend to lie about whether they've been smoking recently.



It's not something we often think about, but cooking creates smells because of food chemistry - and smells are complicated. Even a "simple" food like rice, seen as a relatively "empty" carbohydrate, emits hundreds of unique compounds into the air during cooking, creating a distinct smell.

The experiment in this poster attempts to identify all the compounds emitted by the different varieties of rice, to create a correlation between pleasing smells and particular compounds.

With that information, scientists can conduct more precisely targeted experiments to develop a variety of rice that grows well in a given region, and also fetches a higher price (because it smells better.)



Here's a similar, but not identical, metabolomics experiment with wine. The neat thing I learned here is that one of the smell components of wine, according to wine tasters, is "bike tyre rubber". Hilarious! I've been a cyclist for a long time, and I tell you what ... bike tires don't smell good.



The human body carries about 100 trillion microorganisms in its intestines (a number ten times greater than the total number of human cells in the body) and their role in digestion is extraordinarily complicated, and largely unmapped.

This experiment is pointing out something interesting: Our intestines absorb and process many different types of nutrients, and some them are found in the food we eat, but the majority of them are synthesized for us by the bacteria we carry within. Not just one or two types, like vitamin K and vitamin B, but the majority.

Without this symbiotic relationship, we would be so totally screwed!



Here's one of my favorites. Scientists took three very different meals, ground them up into liquid, and ran the liquid through a high-performance liquid chromatography system...



... Then they categorized the metabolites they detected, and plotted them according to their relative levels in each meal. This particular chart is only a small part of the data they collected. It's a heat map of the triglycerides they measured.

Basically, this is an extremely expensive way to prove that the American meal is chock-full of saturated fats, and the lightweight vegetarian meal is almost entirely fat-free, with the more "Mediterranean" meal in the middle. Whether this even constitutes useful information is debatable, as you may gather from the Wikipedia forest around triglycerides and all the instances of "[citation needed]".

Triglycerides of all types are broken down into their component parts inside the small intestine, and then re-assembled from parts and stuffed into large carrier packages, then passed into the lymph system and from there into the bloodstream. Those carrier packages are called lipoproteins, and they come in various sizes, and serve various roles as they move around in the blood. There are "high-density" lipoproteins and "low-density" lipoproteins, among others, and it's believed that the "low-density" ones encourage heart disease, while the "high-density" ones protect against it.

There is a fuzzy link between the balance of triglycerides you eat, and the balance of "high-density" versus "low-density" lipoprotein packages constructed to carry them around in your blood. It's not as simple as, "avoid fats", and it's not as simple as "avoid carbohydrates". There's also a large, mostly unknown, genetic component, so it's not as simple as "avoid saturated fats". But so far, the fickle finger of fate is pointing mostly at the "Mediterranean" meal as the smartest choice.

Now, if we all had access to those foods at reasonable prices, and we all ate just to stay alive, and not for pleasure or convenience, this would be life-changing information, wouldn't it?

Into this complicated mess, science marches on. At least the charts are pretty.



Meanwhile, the local hardware vendors are giving out candy!



Speaking of getting fat, here's a sobering bit of information. This is from an experiment done on mice, so take that as you will, but what it's basically saying is, if you gain a bunch of weight, your body chemistry changes on a permanent basis. Even if you work the weight off, and keep it off for years, your body will not behave in the old way ever again.



Look! SCIENCE! It means: Perfect hair, perfect makeup, perfect lighting, perfect skin, and a pouty deferential look ... oh and some protective glasses, because hey, this is serious.

Enter a period of psychological stress, and your organs release a steady river of hormones, telling the cells in your body to burn more energy. After a few days of this feedback, your cells begin sending signals to all the mitochondria living inside them, telling them to divide, increasing energy capacity. This is important because when the energy production system is bottlenecked, little chemical packets called "free radicals" are released inside your cells, especially from the struggling mitochondria. Free radicals are quite damaging to the DNA in your cells, including the DNA of your mitochondria. So having the right number of mitochondria for your energy needs is important.

Unfortunately this creates a paradox. Free radicals are the signal that you need more mitochondria. When they are released they damage the DNA in the mitochondria you already have. The only way to correct the balance is for the mitochondria to divide, making more of themselves, and as an unfortunate consequence, the damage done by the free radicals gets magnified. Eventually, there are more mutated mitochondria inside your cells than clean ones, and the whole operation of the cell becomes degraded because of the extra resources this consumes.

As the mitochondria decline in efficiency, the cell will shift across the spectrum of genes it can express, to devote more resources to mitochondria recycling. This reduces its effectiveness as part of a functioning organ.  (Stem cells and heart cells do not divide their mitochondria, and therefore are not directly under the influence of this cycle, but they can still suffer from the decline in other organs.) Each cell also has a feedback loop of signals inside it, designed to detect this degradation. When a cell in your body realizes it has dropped below a reasonable efficiency level, it commits suicide, removing itself and its damaged mitochondria from your collective internal gene pool.

Here's what this means for you, on a human scale: When you pass through a cycle of stress, part of you dies off while the rest of you decides to repopulate, spreading slightly less efficient mitochondria throughout your tissues, resulting in a subtly decreased energy level. You really begin to notice it in middle age.

This effectively cannot be reversed, because you can only work with the genetic supply of mitochondria that you have.  Your best hope for renewed health is to maintain a higher set-point for energy capacity, via a higher standing population of your current mitochondria, so that when you are pressed into other capacity modes - higher stress modes - you do not logjam your energy supply chain and create damaging free-radical elements inside cells.

In other words, sufficient sleep, complete nutrition, and consistent aerobic exercise places your body into its most long-lasting mode.  It delays the onset of virtually ALL late-life diseases.

This may seem like common knowledge, but now you understand why it is so... And why there is absolutely no product, service, or diet that can turn back the clock. Your very best outcome is to slow it down.

On Pokingthingswithsticks, my sister asked:

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the amounts of fats your body is wanting with all that exercise. All the reading I’ve been doing lately really touts lowering starch and grains (wheat) and increasing the fats (even over protein – except when doing lots of exercise like you when you should have lots of protein). Apparently fats can easily be turned into carbs for the body’s use, and we need far more that we think of certian fats to keep brains happy, etc. Whatcha think?

This inspired me to make a long-winded response, which I repost here:

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I think this sort of food balancing is complicated, because there are several totally different - but very valid - ways to approach it. At different times I've vacillated between the approaches.

One approach is to try to research what is actually going on inside our bodies. The digestive system, the nervous system, allergic reactions, insulin response, circadian rhythm, vitamin use, blah blah. This is daunting and endless. New research appears every day, and it seems like every popular writer has a piece of the system to advocate for, as the weathervane around which our diets should be oriented. I recently read some yokel in a forum, claiming that all gluten "increases a chemical called Zonulin in the digestive system", causing "leaky gut" in humans, which eventually kills us all.

Oh the horror.

Another approach is to try and figure out what was eaten by "our ancestors", and eat that, based on the assumption that we evolved to thrive on it. I bet you'd agree with me that way too much of the "research" on this topic amounts to socio-politlcal axe-grinding and extrapolation. Do we consider apes hanging about on African plains as our ancestors, or the Mesopotamian farmers of twelve thousand years ago? Or do we point at the Native Americans of the far north, who went their entire lives without eating a single piece of fruit, a single slice of bread, or a single vegetable? Each could take us in a totally different direction. Do we consider the modern cow the equivalent of the ancient ... whatever it was ... that the tribesmen kept 12000 years ago in Egypt, despite the massive planned and unplanned genetic drift? Of course not. What about the hundred varieties of corn that Native Americans from the middle of the continent slowly accumulated, and built their food systems around? Were they all on totally the wrong track?

And yet another approach is to take our immediate environment and just run experiments. What feels good to eat, long and short term? What doesn't? What seems to make us apathetic and sad, what seems to make us active and strong? What can we go out and try, that we don't usually eat? What do our friends recommend? What did our parents settle on, and raise us eating?

All I know for sure is:
1. The research and the experiment never ends.
2. If you don't do it, you might be missing something important.

But, now to get more specific. You asked what I think about discouraging starch and grains, and increasing fats.

That's appealing for a few reasons:

1. It overlaps with the "Mediterranean" diet, and the Atkins diet. Both are recently popular.
2. We all know high-quality fats are important for the brain and skin.
3. We're all edgy about weight gain, and have settled on "carbs" as the culprit, (relative to our parents' generation, which settled on "fat").

One of the things I remember Atkins touting was the practice of forcing the body into Ketosis, basically by covering all its nutrient and protein needs but starving it for calories, so that the liver is compelled to call for the burning of fat. That description is probably heavy-handed compared to what actually went on inside the bodies of the diets' adherents, but even so, it got results. Lots of people dropped weight, because they were able to remain satiated and thereby stick to the dietary change.

That was cool and all but I remember thinking, at the time, "this feels suspiciously like your basic starvation diet, just without the feeling of starving".

After I read all about that, I got into the vegan thing, very majorly. Then I added eggs into an otherwise meat and dairy-free diet, and that seemed to be my perfect system. I crammed myself full of low-starch vegetables and oil, and got my protein from soy, wheat-gluten, and eggs. I worked my ass off at Apple, got into bicycling, and felt healthy. Unfortunately, at the same time, I developed a habit of "emotional eating", and consumed donuts and cake and fresh-baked challah. I wanted calories and my brain found a way to fit them in.

(It could have been worse - a co-worker of mine at Apple went full-time, after a year of part-time, and the added stress caused him to rapidly gain over 40 pounds. His desk became a graveyard of vending-machine snacks and soda cans. He didn't appear to notice - too busy working.)

While I was doing the vegan thing, I became aware of the notion of "good carbs" and "bad carbs", where the "bad carbs" were refined sugars and wheats and the products made with them, and "good carbs" were unrefined or whole-grain, like brown sugar and blackstrap molasses and whole-wheat toast. The distinction is based on two things: How much of the original nutrients remain, and how rapidly the body absorbs the food (a.k.a. the "glycemic index"). So apparently the trick is to avoid refined things that cause an insulin spike. Your edict to minimize all starch and grains certainly covers this territory - but perhaps a bit too thoroughly.

After that I learned about the power of genetic history, when La discovered that she had fructose malabsorption. That was tricky because it was a structural condition of her digestive system, so she and I could eat the exact same thing and it would affect her body differently. In essence, the problem was with a certain sugar molecule. All fruit and sweeteners are made from three or four simple sugars, each with a similar glycemic index, but ONE of them would give her indigestion and even depression, and the others did no such thing. It was even trickier than that - since almost all fruits contained some level of fructose, La had to make sure she ate something with proportional sucrose in it, which effectively "balanced" the digestive process and prevented the reaction. So it was not only a lesson in genetics, but a lesson in the importance of combining foods.

Most vexing. Where, in the ancient ruins, and the neolithic trash middens, is the signal that La should never ever eat apples or pears, but as many oranges as she wants? And just her - not me?

Anyway, about a year ago I quit the vegan diet and began eating meat - mostly fish, then other things. I did so because I was getting really sick with a dysfunctional thyroid, and losing weight rapidly - 30 pounds in a few months - and was eating everything I could, desperately trying to reverse it. After 7 years of a virtually vegan diet, feeling fine, and fielding apocalyptic warnings from Mom and strangers about it, what really did mess up my health was the emotional HELL I went through in the first six months of 2010.

Find that in a diet book. "Want to lose weight? Sabotage your personal life! Abracadabra."

An aside: You know what doctors prescribed in the 1960's for weight loss? Amphetamines (Benzedrine)! How's that for a direct approach! WHACK.

So, from that ordeal I learned that my weight and physiology had a strong mental component. It sounds obvious when stated plainly, but I had only really considered it in one direction before. That is, I knew that if I ate crap, I would feel bad. But this was proof that the feedback loop went the other way, too. When my mind was upset, it manifested in my body. And not just in temporary changes, but in permanent ones. Because here's what's really freaky: Stress and other physiological conditions can cause our bodies to express different genes. ... Or produce antibodies to previously innocent proteins. You can go from having a rock-solid thyroid gland to an overactive or hair-trigger one, and it will stay that way. You can go from eating wheat every day of your life to having an apocalyptic immunological meltdown from a single sandwich.

The reasons for this are fascinating. Put very simply, the cells in our body do not just contain a single copy of our genome, but a bunch of little snippets of it, all floating around inside, instructing other mechanisms what to do. Different external stimuli will cause the aggregation of snippets to change, and that is a major mechanism in how the body works. Plus, that mixture is preserved as a cell splits into two. (This mechanism is how, for example, a liver cell turns into two liver cells.) So yeah, your genome remains the same from birth onward, and whatever you do during your lifetime you still pass the same genome to your children ... but during your lifetime, all kinds of changes can be wrought by altering that pool of snippets floating around inside each cell. Changes that can affect you for years and years.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say with all this, is, I no longer have any confidence in a particular diet as a panacea. I don't think I will ever stop having to adapt what I eat in pursuit of improved health. Before my bike trip started, I ate piles of dark chocolate and piles of french fries. Now I eat piles of dark chocolate and no french fries. On day 4 I remember staring at a menu and thinking to myself, "I should avoid all these carbs because my body needs to focus on muscle restoration from yesterday." On day 5 I remember thinking, "I should drink this soda or my liver is going to bottom out on glycogen two hours from now and I'll be exhausted and stuck 20 miles outside of town." Now I'm sitting here in the motel room on Day 6, thinking, "It's 3pm and all I've had to eat, all day, is two pieces of chocolate and some peanuts. Why am I not hungry?"

It's all down to a simple molecular process, happening a trillion times over inside your body:

This process, in a nutshell, is why long-distance bicyclists don't stand up in their pedals, and never attempt to "power their way up" a hill. If you have, say, 2000 calories of food percolating in your body and you need to ride as far as you can, burning those 2000 calories in a breathless rush will get you 30 miles -- but burning them aerobically will get you 90 miles or more.

I found this passage in Moonseed amusing:

Of, course there were some who would relish this.

Perhaps there were survivalists, even here in respectable suburban Scotland, waiting for it all to fall apart—heading for the highlands with their cans of corned beef, ready to aim illicit shotguns at anyone who came begging. Or maybe they just wanted some place more challenging to take their 4WDs than the car park of Sainsbury's. Riding out the cosy catastrophe, in Barbour jackets and Land Rovers.

'Fuck them,' said Jane aloud. In a year such folk would be starving, chasing sheep around the highlands, and in two years they would be dead.

This article puts my chocolate cravings in an interesting light. Perhaps I'm one of those individuals with the low-dopamine-receptor gene variant, and that's what compels me to eat so much chocolate in one sitting.

Some people seem content with a few squares, but I will rapidly munch through an entire bar and be ready for more in due time.

I know it's very speculative, but ... could this also be the basis for my family's supposed "predisposition" to drug abuse? One gene, manipulating my response to everything from chocolate to alcohol?

Well, it's probably a collection of genes at least, but still...

So, you're an American agribusiness conglomerate. You discover that your star product has had an unfortunate side-effect on the populace: Over the long haul, it physiologically degrades their insulin response and contributes significantly to obesity and other health problems.

So what do you do?

You mount an ad campaign to distract people from legitimate evidence, with a handful of cherry-picked studies and inane "facts" about your product.

I don't know what irritates me more: The audacious disregard for public welfare demonstrated by the "Corn Refiners' Association", or the misanthropy of the individual people who collected a paycheck while assembling this shitstain of a PR exercise. (Rest assured that some graphic designer somewhere took home several thousand dollars for layout out this garbage.)

Here, read this.

Thomas Friedman's "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention" claims that no country with a McDonald's has gone to war with another. (There have been a couple of exceptions, though.)

Ken and I present: "The Wonderbread Corollary", which states that:

Stabilizers in food act as stabilizers in the people.
Preservatives in food also preserve the peace.
Like white flour, culture is bleached for conformance and then "enriched" afterwards.

Time for a press conference!