Food, Health, Money, Perspicacity

[RhodaGrits]

The problem is more pervasive than just that we need health care for all. Right now, the masses of American citizens are being treated as no more than a great herd of mindless consuming beasts.

The farmers are growing monoculture crops dependent on fossil fuels and tied tightly into a vertically integrated structure to supply mega-corporations with the building blocks of pseudo-food. The soils are depleted of necessary nutrients and the end product is calories but not necessary nutrition.

This food is pro-inflammatory. You are what you eat. And if you eat reconstructed corn and wheat and meat and dairy from factory farms - you get systemic inflammation. Diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, arthritis and obesity. Yes, malnutrition can lead to obesity.

Ruminants are the ultimate solar energy converters - but what do we do? We feed them grain. Nature's perfect fertilizer = their manure spread back onto that grass. With factory farmed animals, we don't get manure... we get toxic waste pools. The circle is unbalanced. And don't take a close look at the short miserable lives of those factory farmed animals - well, you can't because they won't let you in. Did you know there are 65,000 cow dairy herds in this country now? I know because they just sent 'round a notice that one of them had a case of TB trace back to it. Think hard on the public health and "homeland security" implications of that in a nation that has dismantled and neutered its public health regulatory agencies.

Big Business has done to the American farmer what Wal-Mart did to Main Street. We've got cheap toxic toys and cheap toxic food from "somewhere else".

But Big Pharma has the "cure" for all these dietary induced diseases. Take 21 different Rx's to cover all those symptoms. And ultimately end up bankrupt, in pain and dying. But they've successfully strip mined all your assets from cradle to grave.

Did you know that the inventor of the electrocardiogram (EKG) machine in the early 1900's was laughed at because there was so little heart disease in this country that no one thought there would be a market for his invention? Think about that.

We stopped eating local food. Now we are fed food that must have a long shelf life - or at least taste like it does.

And don't even get me started on cholesterol and the statins. Band-Aid-iasis. If you are going to ingest this crap, take statins and endure the side-effects. Or do your homework and find out why you and your loved ones are suffering and step outside this enslavement.

We can't fix the health care crisis until we take a hard look at what is causing so many people in "developed" countries to be fat, dull, and full of pain. And how and why this has come to be.

[eridani]

1. The reason there was little heart disease in 1900--

--was that life expectancy was so low that people died of other things first.

[RhodaGrits]

2. actually, that's not true... a good explanation of why it isn't -

http://weightoftheevidence.blogspot.com/2006/02/life-expectancy-beyond-statistics.html

[eridani]

3. Sure, life expectancy af birth is different from further life expectancy at age 60

You were still far more likely to die of tuberculosis or pneumonia than of a heart attack. So one cause of death is substituted for several others--big deal.

[RhodaGrits]

4. It is a big deal. We've made huge strides in some areas of

medicine - trauma, infection control, surgery. Little to no improvement or even worsening in cancer rates. We'd be seeing significant increases in both quantity and quality of life were it not for an epidemic of chronic disease. Why can't we save the patient from pneumonia AND have them live without Type II Diabetes and nephropathy? It's not either/or.

There's been a huge shift in public health for the worse in this past century because of chronic diseases of inflammation. And insuring more people is not going to do solve the problem at its root.

I think attacking the cause of the epidemic means subverting the machine that benefits from it. Follow the money. We need public health regulatory bodies with teeth that are not beholden to the corporations that profit from pain.

[eridani]

6. Public health has vastly improved in the 20th century

Three key discoveries were insulin, penicillin, and the polio vaccine. Type II diabetes is genetic, but expressed in significant numbers only in societies where most work is sedentary and there is enough to eat. Overall, you get many more years of life in reasonably good health in such societies (as opposed to third world peasant societies), even accounting for the deleterious effects of increased levels of diabetes.

Better control of environmental pollutants should help with cancer, and when the genetics of diabetes is unravelled, I think we'll see more effective treatments.

[RhodaGrits]

7. You must live in a different society than I do.

I read these things and then I look around and do a reality check against my friends, family and clients. They are not living longer and healthier unless they have opted out of the overprocessed foods and if they stay active and enjoy that activity.

You have regurgitated talking points but they don't reflect reality. In my years at an elementary school of 300 children in the early 1960's we had one "retarded" girl and 3 or 4 "fat kids" and one child with insulin dependent diabetes. Compare that to a school today.

My brother had a cholesterol level of 660. It hadn't dipped below 300 in twenty years. I finally screamed - what you are doing is not working, let's try it another way. Within 6 wks we had his number down to 220. His identical twin who eats differently and is physically active doesn't need statins or the gazillion other drugs prescribed to his brother.

Type II Diabetes is a manifestation of systemic inflammation - and yes, it may have a genetic predisposition - just like the smoker that can live to 100+, there are people that can survive a garbage diet and not die.

We don't need more treatments. We need prevention and health.

[eridani]

8. "Inflammation" is a bullshit word that doesn't describe anything

It's associated with various conditions that have hundreds of different causes. Type II diabetes is about cells being unresponsive to insulin, so that sugar is not taken up and stays in the bloodstream.

I'm sure living longer and healhier. I'm genetically diabetic through my father and his mother. When my grandmother was my age, she'd been dead for 10 years. When my father was my age, he'd been dead for three years. My a1C value only went over 7.0 just this year, so I've put off being symptomatic for far longer than either of them. We know far more about diabetes now, including good data on the glycemic indices of various foods. I've had aggressive pretreatment with metformin for 7 or 8 years now, and also the class privilege of a research job which comes with a health club in the basement. My own life validates all the talking points.

[RhodaGrits]

9. Innate immunity and chronic inflammation is not b.s.

I've been involved with research through the NIH and various other research institutes into defects in innate immunity and auto-inflammation for 15 yrs. I am pretty sure I know a lot more about this than you do.

Just one article with a good overview of inflammation in the Abstract:

Nutr Rev. 2007 Dec;65(12 Pt 2):S140-6.Click here to read Links
Inflammatory mechanisms: the molecular basis of inflammation and disease.
Libby P.

Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA 02115, USA. [e-mail]

Inflammation participates importantly in host defenses against infectious agents and injury, but it also contributes to the pathophysiology of many chronic diseases. Interactions of cells in the innate immune system, adaptive immune system, and inflammatory mediators orchestrate aspects of the acute and chronic inflammation that underlie diseases of many organs. A coordinated series of common effector mechanisms of inflammation contribute to tissue injury, oxidative stress, remodeling of the extracellular matrix, angiogenesis, and fibrosis in diverse target tissues. Atherosclerosis provides an example of a chronic disease that involves inflammatory mechanisms. Recruitment of blood leukocytes characterizes the initiation of this disease. Its progression involves many inflammatory mediators, modulated by cells of both innate and adaptive immunity. The complications of established atheroma, including plaque disruption and thrombosis, also intimately involve inflammation. Mastery of the inflammatory response should aid the development of novel strategies to predict disease susceptibility, target and monitor therapies, and ultimately develop new approaches to the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases associated with aging, such as atherosclerosis.

No b.s. there.

Type II Diabetes is an end-stage result. I'm saying we should be going after the causes. Your parents and grandparents would all have been subjected to the same underlying causation. And that is dietary and environmental as well as a genetic predisposition. Another family with the same exposure to pro-inflammatory substances could end up with cardiac disease and strokes because of a different set of DNA.

I obviously have hit a nerve by stating that I believe that your disease may have been preventable. I'm sorry but I think you are a victim of the current dogma.

These diseases of chronic inflammation overlap and are both simple and complicated. The simple common factor is inflammation - the complicated part are the interactions that lead to the plethora of visible signs and symptoms: diabetes, obesity, alzheimer's, nephropathies, arthritis, atherosclerosis and vasculitis, etc.

Another Abstract illustrating two examples of overlapping pathogenesis:

Biochim Biophys Acta. 2008 Nov 5.
Insulin resistance and amyloidogenesis as common molecular foundation for type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer's disease.
Zhao WQ, Townsend M.

Alzheimer's Research, Merck Research Laboratories, 770 Sumneytown Pike, 26A-2000 West Point, PA 19486, USA.

Characterized as a peripheral metabolic disorder and a degenerative disease of the central nervous system respectively, it is now widely recognized that type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) share several common abnormalities including impaired glucose metabolism, increased oxidative stress, insulin resistance and amyloidogenesis. Several recent studies suggest that this is not an epiphenomenon, but rather these two diseases disrupt common molecular pathways and each disease compounds the progression of the other. For instance, in AD the accumulation of the amyloid-beta peptide (Abeta), which characterizes the disease and is thought to participate in the neurodegenerative process, may also induce neuronal insulin resistance. Conversely, disrupting normal glucose metabolism in transgenic animal models of AD that over-express the human amyloid precursor protein (hAPP) promotes amyloid-peptide aggregation and accelerates the disease progression. Studying these processes at a cellular level suggests that insulin resistance and Abeta aggregation may not only be the consequence of excitotoxicity, aberrant Ca(2+) signals, and proinflammatory cytokines such as TNF-alpha, but may also promote these pathological effectors. At the molecular level, insulin resistance and Abeta disrupt common signal transduction cascades including the insulin receptor family/PI3 kinase/Akt/GSK3 pathway. Thus both disease processes contribute to overlapping pathology, thereby compounding disease symptoms and progression.

Keep it simple.

We can do far more to prevent the inciting inflammation. But there's money to be made in the causation and in the treating and much less in prevention.

[eridani]

10. It is not preventable. What people with those genes can do is postpone onset

--of symptoms, hopefully until they die of something else. That's what used to happen to our ancestors who did hard labor on short rations. It's the inflammation that is end-stage, not the genetics. The causative environmental conditions are a basic fact of life that you can't easily change either. The 30-40% of the population with Syndrome X can't possibly compete for the 5% of jobs in our society that require physical activity. Enough to eat has sufficient benefits that cancel out its tendency to promote insulin resistance in susceptible people, mainly the almost total elimination of micronutrient deficiency diseases.

What's next? Phenylketonuria as lifestyle "inflammatory" disease? Why bother to test for the gene? Just tell everybody to quit being so irresponsible as to have too much phenylalanine in their diets. Being able to postpone or prevent symptom development doesn't change the underlying genetics of diabetes either.

Life ends eventually. Trading percentages of which diseases finally do you in is a silly and futile endeavor.

I'd rather not be genetically diabetic, but I prefer existence to non-existence. I get to exist because some of my female ancestors were able to have normal weight babies that could survive in times of starvation. (Of course many of their descendants with enough to eat have the opposite problem--babies that tend to be too big.) Type II diabetes is a survival mechanism, in much the same sense that sickle cell anemia is a survival mechanism.

[RhodaGrits]

11. Back to my original premise - that we are what we eat -

This supports my point... that our modern diet is pro-inflammatory. Look at this list of the foods that predisposed to type 2 diabetes:

Diabetes Care. 2008 Nov 25. Click here to read Links
Food intake patterns associated with incident type 2 diabetes: The Insulin Resistance Atherosclerosis Study.
Liese AD, Weis KE, Schulz M, Tooze JA.

Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Center for Research in Nutrition and Health Disparities, Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.

Objective: Markers of hemostasis and inflammation such as plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) and fibrinogen have been associated with risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus. We aimed to identify food intake patterns influencing this pathway and evaluated their association with incident diabetes. Research Design and Methods: The Insulin Resistance Atherosclerosis Study cohort included 880 middle-aged adults initially free of diabetes. At 5-year follow-up, 144 persons had developed diabetes. Usual dietary intake was ascertained with a 114-item food frequency questionnaire. Using reduced rank regression we identified a food pattern maximizing explained variation in PAI-1 and fibrinogen. Subsequently, the food pattern - diabetes association was evaluated using logistic regression. Results: High intakes of the food groups red meat, low fiber bread and cereal, dried beans, fried potatoes, tomato vegetables, eggs, cheese, cottage cheese, and low intake of wine characterized the pattern, which was positively associated with both biomarkers. With increasing pattern score, the odds of diabetes increased significantly (p for trend <0.01). After multivariate adjustment, the odds ratio (OR) comparing extreme quartiles was 4.3, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.7-10.8. Adjustment for insulin sensitivity and secretion and other metabolic factors had little impact (OR 4.9, 95% CI 1.8-13.7). Conclusions: Our findings provide support for potential behavioral prevention strategies, as we identified a food intake pattern which was strongly related to PAI-1 and fibrinogen and independently predicted type 2 diabetes.

A pro-inflammatory diet leads to type 2 diabetes in predisposed individuals. And yes, in our "modern" society, its very difficult to avoid the inciting agents. That's my point. I eat an anti-inflammatory diet and there is almost nothing I can eat that I don't have to cook for myself or my family. I'd rather live long and feel good than live long and chronically ill. That choice is not trading one death for another.

[eridani]

12. Give up beans and tomatoes? Not on your friggin' life!

Food obsessions are not only idiotic, they are stressful. Adrenaline is a really great insulin antagoninst. Anything you give up for one reason has some kind of benefit, like the anti-cancer lycopenes in tomatoes and the soluble fiber in beans. So yes, you are just trading a risk of one kind of death for another.

[RhodaGrits]

13. Huh? What do food obsessions have to do with the price of beans?

At least you are resigned to your fate.

You're correct that tomatoes have good lycopene and they help with some things but vascular inflammation is not one:

Clin Invest Med. 2007;30(2):E70-4.
Tomato-rich (Mediterranean) diet does not modify inflammatory markers.
Blum A, Monir M, Khazim K, Peleg A, Blum N.

Department of Internal Medicine A, Baruch-PadehPoriya Medical Center, Lower Galilee, Israel. [e-mail]

BACKGROUND: The Mediterranean diet is rich in lycopene and has been reported to reduce cardiovascular events. The mechanism of prevention of cardiovascular events has not been clearly established. Our aim was to study the effects of a tomatoes-rich diet on markers of vascular inflammation. METHODS: Plasma concentrations of E-selectin, intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1), and high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) were determined by ELISA in 103 apparently healthy volunteers. Volunteers were randomly assigned to two groups: 50 participants ate 300 g tomatoes daily for 1 month, and 53 participants ate their usual diet with tomatoes prohibited during that period. Markers of inflammation were measured before enrollment and 1 month after their assigned diet. RESULTS: The two diet groups had similar baseline clinical characteristics and similar baseline levels of inflammatory markers. After 30 days of assigned diet concentrations of hs-CRP, E-selectin and ICAM-1 were unchanged compared with baseline in the tomato-rich diet. However, ICAM-1 concentration was increased in the regular diet group from 247.55+/-55 ng/ml to 264.71+/-60.42 ng/ml (P=0.01). CONCLUSIONS: The mechanisms of benefit of the tomato-rich diet are not directly related to inhibition of markers of vascular inflammation.

[eridani]

16. In other words, despite the fact that they are linked with inflammation, they are still beneficial

My point is that food obsessions are stupid unless you have some specific intolerances. Assuming that you avoid junk snack food, just about anything that is unhealthy in some way is healthy in some other way. My fate is the same as yours--eventual death from something or another.

[Joe Chi Minh]

19. "My fate is the same as yours--eventual death from something or another."

Great reason for not taking care of your health.

[eridani]

20. I'm coping with the genes I was born with very nicely, thankyewverymuch

I've outlived my ancestors, and have been in considerably better health overall.

[Joe Chi Minh]

18. Your life validates all, the talking points. That says it all. If that is not

perfectly egocentric tunnel-vision I don't know what is.

I'm not a technical expert like Rhoda, but I can spot someone with a commercial axe to grind from a mile away. It's not too difficult, because they try to defend the indefensible - as you are doing.

[eridani]

22. I have no commercial axe to grind.

what I am doing in my life requires only access to health insurance and decent options for exercise, both of which are pretty common, though not nearly as widely available as they should be. I'm just sick of people bullshitting about the good old days when people were supposedly much healthier.

[RhodaGrits]

23. Pre-1900 human lives were often short and brutal. No argument.

We've done a very good job of making sure that children survive infancy (although not as good a job as twenty-odd other countries despite our enormous expenditures on health care) and we can fix up traumatic injuries in ways that are awe-inspiring. We have turned a blind eye to the costs of eating factory farmed and raised food that has to be transported 1500+ miles to our tables. And I would argue that we are blind to this because of corporate slight of hand.

[eridani]

25. I agree 100% on corporate farming--ecological effects are a major disaster.

I fortunately have the class privilege to do a lot of local eating, which all too many people don't

[RhodaGrits]

26. The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan is probably the

best mainstream, entertaining description of this food mess that I've read. Have you seen it?

[eridani]

28. It's on my list. Big thing for me right now is universal health care n/t

[RhodaGrits]

5. delete dupe n/t

[walldude]

14. I agree that we eat crap, but you seem to think that getting

people to eat healthier should come before getting people insured. Well speaking from a family of 5 with no health insurance you are wrong. My kid falls out of a tree and breaks something and I am out 5-10 grand for a visit to the emergency room. That kind of shit will kill me faster than eating Twinkies.

[RhodaGrits]

15. Absolutely not. We need national health insurance ASAP.

But we can't just pay for treatment. We need to address why we have a country that is worse than many third world nations in terms of our health. We spend more on health care now than any other nation yet we are way below the "G20" in the health of our nation's citizen's.

If your kid falls out of a tree, the ER docs are amazing at fixing that. We do that well. Let's get you insured so that they can do that job. It's the stuff that U.S. medicine isn't resolving to which I object.

[eridani]

17. Prevention is good because it improves peoples' lives. The notion that it saves money is delusional

For one thing, longer lives mean more a lot more expense, as you have increased the chances of nasty and expensive accidents occuring. I am going to cost the system far more than my father or my grandmother, both of whom died comparatively young.

For another thing, 5% of the population accounts for 50% of health care costs, and 20% account for 80% of the costs. All the clean living on the part of people who don't cost much money is meaningless to overall health care costs.

[RhodaGrits]

21. Yes you are expensive. You are among the 20% that's costing so much.

I'd rather see the next generation not get overt type II diabetes. If we can decrease the numbers of people afflicted with chronic inflammatory disorders, we will decrease overall health care costs.

And better yet, we'll improve the quantity and quality of life for many people.

I have a much older friend whose parents died young of cardiac disease or stroke. She did everything "right" according to the experts and she had a first stroke 10 years after her mother did. She's now recuperating from open heart surgery. I would argue that they treated her better but never addressed the underlying causes. I know what she eats and it doesn't surprise me that she's still having trouble. She's also suffering from severe arthritis and has needed to have joint replacements. That is expensive and it's all inter-related.

Cheap food at Wal-Mart is not so cheap.

[eridani]

24. My ancestors were far sicker and therefore less expensive

I prefer my better health. I'm not costing much now, but the longer I live, the more likely I am to get clobbered by a drunk driver or something of that sort. Dying young saves that expense. With 1/3 of the population having Syndrome X, Type II isn't going away, although it's certainly possible to get better at postponing symptoms. Type II diabetes happens to be genetically beneficial in the same way that sickle cell anemia is beneficial. Unfortunately, the benefits only apply in societies where you do a lot of hard labor on short rations in one case, and in malaria belts in the other.

[Greyhound]

27. K&R You are exactly right.

There is still a great for sovereign nations.