Beef – and eggs – just got a lot more interesting.
A group of researchers fed lean beef (nicely cooked) to a bunch of everyday meat eaters and vegans. They then investigated.
Did ingesting lean beef change lipid levels in the blood – you know, the stuff supposed to cause heart disease, stroke and potentially kill you? Not all that much much. But the beef contained lots of carnitine (carnem – latin for meat), often used as an “herbal” supplement. The gut bacteria in the meat eaters transformed carnitine into TMAO. TMAO is considered a very bad actor in atherogenesis – plaque formation and hardening of the arteries.
Then came the differences. The habitual meat eaters produced a whole lot more TMAO than the vegans. The vegans seemed to lack the “right” bacteria to convert carnitine into TMAO.
Eat meat, change your bacteria. You then get more of the same bacteria. The bugs then convert your food into at least one presumed arterial clogger.
Within a few weeks, a different group of researchers found the same results with eggs.
As we have learned over the last few years, when it comes to food, bacteria rule. Those 100 trillion critters do far more than digest food and make vitamins, environmental gas and usefully smooth effluent.
What bacteria really prove is a fact people should belatedly recognize – that the body is a giant information system/ecosystem. Inside it, food as information is transformed in millions of ways.

Does This Explain Why Meat Eaters Have More Atherosclerosis?
No. It just adds another potential cause.
There are plenty of new ones to go around. Every time you eat an animal or plant, you eat its genetic material.
Last year scientists in Nanjing found that humans absorb the micro-RNAs of plants. Some, like those from rice, increase cholesterol synthesis.
Eat rice, ingest RNA, change gene expression, create more cholesterol.
Who knew? There lots of other things we don’t know but probably will – maybe even soon (see below).

What Are the Implications For Nutrition?
1. That looking at food as collections of protein, carbohydrates, and fats may be useful for nutritionists, food companies, and school lunch committees, but remains hopelessly simplistic.
Foods contain thousands of other substances and chemicals which have not been characterized, studied in depth or investigated overh time. Many of these substances have strong physiologic, even drug effects.
What our 100 trillion bacteria do to them matters greatly. And what also matters is just what populations of bacteria happen to inhabit you when you ingest that food – rather like which countries hold what territory on a map.
Lots of other factors change how you transform the food inside you. They include how much you move, how and when you rest, how and when you eat, the size of your plates, the wall color of restaurants, etc. Most people don’t think that people given the same meal in a red room will eat one third more of the same meal than in a blue. But they do.
Food is complicated information – especially when it’s fun to eat.

The Implications for Supplements
We know hardly anything about what supplements really do. Marketing mavens and very friendly lobbyists have managed to pay off enough politicians  to make sure supplements are lightly regulated and investigated – and allow them to be sold everywhere and to anyone – no matter what the buyer’s age.
Their marketing material “shows” they provide remarkable benefits – thicker hair, weight loss, sudden energy, better love making, increased attractiveness, and long life. However, most of the time the proof is inversely related to the breadth of their claims.
Carnitine is beloved of weight lifters. It’s also sold to lose weight and prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Do not expect supplement makers to actively market its potential for causing heart attack and stroke.
Which, honestly, is merely a hypothesis at this point. Like a lot of other things about supplements, no one knows what they really do. It’s possible that in the end carnitine might benefit some heart patients.
But what you don’t know may do harm.

The Implications For the Biome
Bacteria are powerful. We live with them – lots of them. Many of our genes are similar to theirs – or come from them. They change our food, produce vital resources, shift our immunity, and possess the potential to kill us – quickly.
It’s time we paid great attention to this large, non-voting population. Now implicated in autism, MS, atherosclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, and America’s media public health enemy # 1 – weight – our individual, local bacteria may make or break us.
Except we don’t know how they do it.

Implications for the Food Industry
Food is about more than taste. It’s about health and health policy.
Survival, in fact. Including global environmental survival.
Bacteria don’t just affect disease. They probably change taste. They may, in time, be found to profoundly affect what we like to eat.
Chefs need to start seriously checking out the biome.

Implications for Health
The human body is a constantly regenerating information system. You are constantly remade.
Understanding that food is a form of information can get rid of a lot of domain specific academic and media hooey.
If you see every food as containing hundreds to thousands of information molecules, all of which change human and bacterial physiology, some things begin to make sense. You can stop obsessing about counting calories and start watching what food actually does to you – to your genes, your brain, your heart, your pleasures, pain, and future survival. You can get food out of the nutritional science ghetto and return its rightful place – central in life.
You can also start explaining things that have hitherto proven very confusing to some researchers:
Food is love. Food is pleasure. Food is energy. Food is fuel.
Food is a metabolic substrate for gut bacteria that transforms it into innumerable subtances that vastly affect individual physiology.
Food is information.
Rest, sleep, Sarasota Sleep Doctor, well-being, regeneration,healthy without health insurance, longevity, body clocks, insomnia, sleep disorders, the rest doctor, matthew edlund, the power of rest, the body clock, psychology today, huffington post, redbook, longboat key news

ADD is now “epidemic” across America.  With 13% of adolescents “diagnosed” in national surveys, people want to know just how big a problem ADD is.  A recent article by psychiatrist by Vatsal Thakkar in the NY Times argued much of ADD may be misdiagnosed sleep disorders.  Himself once diagnosed as suffering from ADD, Thakkar was later discovered to suffer from  “atypical narcolepsy” and has improved with  stimulants and antidepressants – along with lifestyle changes.

So what’s the truth?

Does Everyone Have ADD?

When John Ratey published his very popular popular book on ADD there was a joke among the marketing team.  One member would stand up and say “I have ADD.”

Then the rest would stand up – one by one.  All of them.

Distractibility, forgetfulness, inability to finish work on time, minds that go in five directions at once – these “ADD” symptoms are actually common in the population.  They are particularly common in people suffering with manic-depression and depression and in people who are sleep deprived.

Why the latter?

Bodies regenerate to survive.  We must continuously regenerate to function.  We learn or we die.

Sleep deprive most anybody and they get distractible, forgetful, slow, cognitively clueless.  They’re tired, dull, sleepy.  And they often feel stupid.

Now, don’t just do this in a lab with friendly undergraduates prodding you to stay up all night.  Do it societally.

Tell kids they can go to bed whenever they want.  Let them take their cellphones into that bed to text all night.  Rouse them in the morning, and give them enough money to buy energy drinks so they can caffeinate themselves sufficiently to appear sort-of awake in class.

Voila!  A population that “fits” many  ADD symptoms.

And a population that 1. Will gain weight – an expected result of partial sleep deprivation 2. Not learn very well – you don’t consolidate memory or cognitively restructure without sleep 3. Be more reckless in behavior – Tom Balkin’s work on this in the military is fairly hair-raising. 4. Not look very pretty or handsome – a great bounty for cosmetic manufacturers and aestheticians.

The physiology is relatively simple – regenerate or die.  And kids and adolescents don’t just regenerate – they grow. A lot.

So they need more sleep to grow than they get.  A lot more than their stressed, often overworked parents, many of whom try to endure on 6.5 hours or less of sleep.  Even older adolescents probably need at least 9 hours on average to learn (including sports skills ) and remain functional.  Instead they emulate sleep deprived parents – who need less sleep than the kids.

And that represents an extraordinary  “opportunity” – one where lots of folks can make a lot of money.

Who Makes Money From ADD Diagnoses?

The number of “special interests” is surprisingly large.  Certainly there are doctors and therapists and ADD “coaches”.  They are however, a rather small section of those who really cash in when ADD diagnostic criteria are kept wide:

1. Drug companies.  Big Pharma has come to love ADD.  Not only can they concoct new, patent protected extended release forms of old drugs that cost many multiples more than the old generics.  They benefit further when governments, like that of Florida, ration the number of stimulant pills because of illegal drug use (see below).  Somehow, the cheaper generics seem to become unobtainable, though the vastly more expensive patent protected pharmaceuticals remain in supply.  Plus there are millions and millions of kids who will “need” stimulants born every year – and their “need” – according to some clinical metrics – may last much of their lives.

2. Educational testing services and educational institutions.  Many parents who want their kids to attend “good” colleges will fight to obtain any edge.  Getting an ADD diagnosis makes for preferential testing conditions.  It also provides legal access to stimulants.  Many parents – and their children – are convinced these drugs improve overall school performance (this group tends not to see the profound, sometimes horrible downsides of sleeplessness, recklessness, moodiness, addiction and death.)  If diagnosing John and Joanie with ADD means admission to Cornell versus Bucknell, will all parents hesitate?

3. Drug dealers.  With so many kids getting diagnoses of ADD, drug dealers can buy from the youngsters and have “real”, non-street drugs to sell. And with kids often “exchanging” drugs with their friends for “recreation”, a new group of addicts soon appear.

4. Sleep diagnosticians.  It turns out that kids with sleep apnea may develop the full stigmata of ADD.  Treat them with tonsillectomies or CPAP devices and a lot of them  – by no means all – get better.  And chronic partial sleep deprivation, particularly when it complicates and worsens ADD and depression, can provide sleep labs a lot of business.

How Does This Affect Kids with Severe ADD?

Badly.  With the diagnosis so prevalent, their conditions may be derided or neglected.  Many also cannot afford medications that might help them.

Why Is It So Hard to Diagnose ADD Properly?

1. With so many interest groups involved, the diagnosis is infected by politics and money – as the fights over DSM-V are bearing out.

2. Most psychiatric diagnoses are phenemonological, and demand complicated and careful history taking, rather than the check lists beloved of Big Pharma and educational testers.

3. ADD is a continuous, rather than a dichotomous variable, much as blood pressure is.  Since the symptoms look worse – or are  mimicked – when people have sleep deficits, mood disorders, or even stress – people can “move over the line” into the diagnosable ADD category.

4. The need to take into account the whole life of people – their sleep and diet, their parents and school stressors (do they have to do soccer, the chess club, volunteer at the Salvation Army  maintain a 5.0 grade average and win the county clarinet competition?)  With their specific domains of expertise, doctors and therapists can miss both the forests and the trees.

Bottom Line

ADD symptoms can be caused by sleep disorders, like sleep apnea.  Sleep disorders can also exacerbate ADD symptoms.

Yet ADD – the amazing distractibility, intractability, impulsiveness, recklessness, forgetfulness, and full blown cognitive inability to learn simple things simply – is not a sleep disorder.

If you foul up normal human regeneration a lot of things fall apart  – particularly health and performance.  And ADD is just part of that much larger picture.
Rest, sleep, Sarasota Sleep Doctor, well-being, regeneration,healthy without health insurance, longevity, body clocks, insomnia, sleep disorders, the rest doctor, matthew edlund, the power of rest, the body clock, psychology today, huffington post, redbook, longboat key news

Say it is isn’t so.  But according to a meta-analysis performed by researchers at the University of Tokyo, hairlessness is connected to heart disease.

What Did They Find?

Among 37,000 men taken from 6 studies out of a possible 850, baldness “increased” the risk of heart disease.

How Was the Study Done?

The researchers looked at most studies of the subject, dumped most, and then reorganized and re-analyzed the data according to their own prescriptions and beliefs.

How Accurate is That?

Depends on the data and the analyzers.  Many epidemiologists love such meta-analyses. This was done in part using the Cochrane Library, a vast international data base.  Such meta-analyses increase the “power” of statistical study to show real results.  However, others think such studies put together apples and plums and then provide results for apples.

Not all studies are equally reliable – even if you put them all together.

What Else Did The Researchers Show?

The worse the baldness, the worse the risk.  And the risk only exist for men who grew bald from the crown, not the front (“vertex risk”).  These are the kind of results that seem to increase biologists’ belief in the results, as they follow linear models of disease increase.

Not all biological behavior is linear.  What we have here is another “risk factor” for heart disease.  Already there are hundreds.

What Is a Risk Factor?

A statistical correlate that hopefully means something in the natural world.  Cholesterol is perhaps the most famous risk factor for heart disease, but the list is very long.  If each of them were naively added together, many of us would possess a 5000% chance of getting heart disease.

Getting a hair transplant won’t decrease your risk of heart disease – though probably some dermatologists and plastic surgeons will be advertising such before long.

Correlation is not causation.  Even if 85% of Americans die in bed, that does not mean beds kill people.  If anything, bed use seems to increase populations.

So What Do Risk Factors Measure?

Generally some biological correlate of risk.  Cholesterol presumably works through increasing atherosclerosis, or changing inflammation, but that argument is ongoing.

How Would Baldness Be Bad for the Heart?

The standard research answer is given by the authors – “the association between male pattern baldness and coronary heart disease deserves further investigation.”

That’s a polite way of saying nobody knows.

What you do know – the body continually regenerates itself to survive, constantly rejiggering its information formats.  As it does we become bigger or smaller, taller or thinner, remain hairy or lose more hair.  Since we are not immortal, aging seems to muck up the regenerative process.

Loss of hair may related to genes that remake arteries, to general levels of inflammation, or perhaps just the enduring sadness of otherwise vigorous males losing their reproductive allure to the opposite sex.  It may also be related to the chemicals in the air or water, antidepressant or anti-seizure drug use,  antibiotic levels in meat, pollution, or the economic and family stress of our times that literally do cause hair to fall out.

Chances are it’s related – “associated” – with a lot of things.  That’s why researchers get notably cagey when explaining what their results actually mean.

Do We Take Risk Factors Too Seriously?

Absolutely.  Drug companies made such a pile with statins that they started believing their own advertising – that changing risk factors would change health.  They had already convinced the FDA.

So they spent billions on drugs increasing HDLs – high density lipoproteins – the “good” cholesterol.  Those drugs worked.  HDL levels went up.

As did cardiac deaths.

It turned out that statins worked very well for some reasons other than originally stated – that is, through lowering cholesterol.  They did things to arterial membranes that were very helpful.

Once again, correlation is not causality.

Bottom Line:

Be skeptical.

Recognize that not just the media, the public, but many clinicians and researchers do not understand the intricacies of the normative, Gaussian statistics they routinely use to tell if studies are “significant” or not.

Risk factors are just that – risk correlates.  Some have a lot of meaning, others close to none.

End points matter.  It’s better for most men to have a full head of hair.

But losing hair doesn’t give them bad hearts.
Rest, sleep, Sarasota Sleep Doctor, well-being, regeneration,healthy without health insurance, longevity, body clocks, insomnia, sleep disorders, the rest doctor, matthew edlund, the power of rest, the body clock, psychology today, huffington post, redbook, longboat key news