Red Devil About Red Meat

Meat makes man mortal. Ok, that's not so bad if, like I do, you also hope one day to die. The bad news is the way in which your mortality becomes more apparent through eating red meat.

Red meat consumption is linked to higher heart disease and cancer. Ok, are they causative? Not necessarily, but this is a problem with all science, which creates knee-jerk reactions of all kinds leading the banning of DDT, CO2, and now 2,2,4-trimethyl pentane and beef (which is also threatened by the Flattulence Tax).

Here's the codicil:

The study relied on people's memory of what they ate, which can be faulty.
In the analysis, the researchers took into account other risk factors such as smoking, family history of cancer and high body mass index.

Ok, now, I support this. Why? Scientifically, meat is high in nitrogenous waste, which must be purged immediately to keep the blood from being toxic. Secondly, most amino acids cannot be directly incorporated into proteins, so they must either be modified or metabolized. Third, animals do not eat the best foods- mad cow disease by way of example comes from feeding cows the ground up meat from other cows, and if that includes brain matter of a diseased cow the consuming cow will catch it. Even in Austria, which is a green and organic country, guess how they fertilize the fields of grass? They spray liquid cow dung on it. Gross.

Finally, meat must be cooked to be edible. Even if only one bacillus survives, E. coli doubles fast enough that one survivor can pollute you with millions in rapid succession. During cooking, the chemical structure, and therefore the utility, of components falls apart, making most of it of little use except as glucose substitutes. Also, if you cook it poorly, via charring, an innocuous enzyme in the liver can turn that harmless byproduct into a carcinogen.

Some people claim that you can't bulk up without meat, but cows just eat grass, and they bulk up just fine. Do you need meat? No. I love fish, and a really, really, really good steak tastes good now and then.

Math Conundrums

If according to Dante 1+1=1 (one government plus one people to rule equals one society), then according to Tolkien, 3+7+9=1 (three rings for the elves, seven for the dwarves, and nin for men equal one master ring).

Also, 1 does not equal 1, else my one soldier could defeat your one army, or my one experiment should trump your one career.

Food for thought...

My Beef With Organics

This past week, I butted heads with a good friend over the issue of organic foods. As soon as I explained why, she understood where I came from and seemed less adverse to my reasoning for opposing organics as presently constituted.

As a graduate student, I studied secondary metabolism deposition in plant tissues. We measured volatiles and terpenoids primarily in root, shoot, and berry throughout the vegetative process through to post-veraison. Results for Vitis vinifera varietals demonstrated how secondary metabolites are processed.

My problem with organics is how they come to market. We could track based on chemical properties to the exact day when fruit was ripe and ready for picking. Many organics are, like the foods they replace, picked before they are ripe for transport. Our research demonstrated that most of the chemoprotectants for which we consume plants (like tocopherols, resveratrol, etc.) remain in tissues we don't consume until the plant is absolutely certain the fruit will be set. A day or two prior to ripening, the plant starts shuttling these metabolites from leaves and stem to the fruit, and not before.

For this major reason, organic foods come to market as bereft of the nutrients for which we eat them as their inorganic counterparts, offering no added nutritional benefit, often at much higher cost. If you eat them because they come without hormones or inorganic phosphate, fine, but if you think you're getting better nutrition, consider from whence they come.

The best way to get pure unadulterated foods is to grow as many of them yourself as possible. That way you control the food you eat from seed to salad. You raise it without exogenous chemicals. You pick it at the height of ripeness. You consume food that you know meets all of your criteria. If you buy it because it says organic assuming it's better for you, it might be, but chances are it's just a more expensive fecal precursor than that which your neighbors buy and offers no more chemoprotectants to countermand assaults on your health than inorganics. Caveate empor.

Conditionalities of the Unseen

I was just talking to a friend about how we're smack dab in the middle of cold and flu season. Some rather famous personages, including Rush Limbaugh, despite the medications and precautions they take, managed to catch flu, colds, or bronchitis so far this season. Not that I think colds are bad; by contrast, I think that periodic infections are good. Note that most of the major pandemics break out in civilized countries. Said virologist Gerald Lancz, we're scrubbing our kids down so much that we can't help but expect them to get sick.

By contrast, I cannot honestly remember the last time I "caught a cold". This might seem odd or perhaps by my own measurements alarming if you don't consider what I do for a living. As part of the microbiology lab in which I'm involved here, I obtain, maintain, and retain a series of strains of infectious microorganisms, including LVL2 Biohazard microbes (including E. coli, Diptheria, Cholera, and similar). The practical application of this I suppose is that periodic subclinical infections keep my immune system regularly challenged, such that it leaves little opportunity for opportunistic infections to take hold.

Without this information, it might seem that I'm more resilient against infection or that I'm "due" to catch something. Reality indicates however that I'm regularly and constantly under assault, but that my body is always ready to turn back the tide of invaders.

Some of the people I know who get flu shots complain that they don't work, and many people complain about responses of plants for which they care even after I dispense advice. What they do not realize is that that microbial world remains largely invisible to me. IN the first case, they probably catch the common cold, bronchitis, or even pneumonia after a flu shot and not the flu, such infections made possible by the fact that the body starts a primary response to influenza (which is a virus and MUST be fought by a secondary antibody-mediated immune response). In the second, they pretend that plants don't catch "colds" per se. Tobacco mosaic virus is basically akin to catching leprosy for a plant, but we don't pay it much mind.

Many things in science are not paid much mind. Touching plants induces genes. A failure in my building's climate control system shuts of laminar hood air flow (which was bad when I was mixing acetone and petroleum ether). However, I do not believe there are any coincidences. The problem for researchers is that when people discover unexpected things in science, they often don't provide public explanations if they come up with them at all. More often than not I observed scientists omit "anomalous" outliers in order to publish results when the outliers more accurately reflected the truth about that phenomenon.

When I studied diterpenes and volatiles in Vitis vinifera, we found, much to the chagrin of the funding agency that resveratrol increased only twofold in the berries but fiftyfold in the leaves under abiotic stress. That makes perfect sense biochemically now that I think about it, but if you're selling wine as an herbal supplement, that doesn't help your marketing. If you're making tea out of grape leaves, it's tantamount to a breakthrough. It wasn't what they wanted, but it was still useful.

One other thing that threw off our calculations was the alfalfa field adjacent to the vineyard. Overflow runoff from irrigation of that field influenced the grapes immediately antecedent, so once we were able to identify the source of the error, we omitted that one block out of the six total blocks of data available (a loss of 15 plants per subset out of 90 total biological replicates) until the situation rectified itself. Arbitrary omission or fanciful inclusion would have rendered our data irrelevant even if correct because it was founded on bad science.

Much goes on that we cannot see. The kind of scientific investigations in which I engaged as a graduate student involved ppb measurements, far below the detection levels of almost any human sense except taste/smell (which isn't quantitative). Just because we cannot see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Yet my colleagues by and large also remain skeptics and atheists, except when they want me to buy their conclusions in peer review.

Consider Classic Experiments

As part of the class I teach, the students get grades and complete some assignments on WebCT. One of them complained to me the other day about not being able to do something on the system and how much they loath it. I’m inclined to agree.

When I went to college, I didn’t actually want internet. I didn’t want to sit for hours at a time in front of the monitor surfing pointlessly, playing LAN games, or getting into trouble. Since I also know about Echelon, I also balked at the prospect of being tracked by the government whenever I opened a site, even if I ended up their accidentally. However, before too long, in one lab course I took in Biochemistry, we were required to, like my students are, complete assignments on WebCT.

If not for that, I probably would never have started a blog or wasted as much time as I have playing MMORPGs or in IM conversations. When it’s up to me, I prefer now to sit in my chair and read or play my guitar, now that it’s fixed. I find those things far more fulfilling, probably since I control them. You control very little on the internet.

Besides, old technology has its advantages. So many thieves have switched to online for easy money, that it’s almost become safe to send checks in the mail. Plus, they never steal a password for websites if I transact business via the USPS. It’s a lot of work to steal money through the mail, and you have to be physically there in order to do it. People can steal money from your account from the comfort of their home in Estonia while sitting nude smoking crack if they like.

Scientific technology likewise has come along so far that you can get publications for simpler things. For demonstrating that a gene has incomplete dominance or only a single allele (which is something they spend one whole lecture on in genetics classes), you can get into a journal because nobody does that anymore. A researcher in the lab I worked got his MS doing Chlorophyll fluorescence as a marker of stress. Nobody uses it, but it’s indisputable and very very easy, if only you own the equipment. Don’t ignore classics like Southern Blotting for ELISA or Y2H assays. Besides being simple and cheap, it leaves tangible results, not just readouts of electrons on a screen.

Federally Funded Fishing Expeditions

As a biochemist by training, I grow increasingly tired at claims that scientific media “proves” environmental decay, a genetic basis for deviant behavior, evolution, or that medication causes disease states. What most people, including sadly many scientists, don’t realize is that much of science is no longer hypothesis-driven, leading to false presumptions and inconclusive conclusions from the data we collect. Rather, in order to maximize publications and fame, scientists sacrifice the quest to solve problems and embark on federally funded fishing expeditions in hopes of collecting mass amounts of data and finding something there from with which to wow the public. Nobody seems interested in following through on a project that has end user application, because those quests take a lifetime without promise of any return on the investment. Worse, nobody will fund those who maintain this ethical problem-solving strategy because society demands results.

Science doesn’t prove anything. Science disproves all other possibilities until only the truth presumably remains. In a hypothesis-driven endeavor, one collects data and tries to refute the hypothesis. Evidence either refutes the belief or proves insufficient to disprove the hypothesis. In this way, no matter how overwhelming the data, the truth is never really proved, we are merely unable to disprove it. This phenomenon is easily illustrated by physics, which is highly content-specific: all that we know about resistance, gravity and acceleration forces and “constants” applies only in the context of the earth. Although the principles remain the same, all the parameters change when we leave the planet, and some forces change depending on our latitude on this one.

Non-scientists refuse to accept this fundamental truth of science- that we cannot “prove” much by experimentation. Data at best provides evidence that A and B are related or that A and B may be causative agents of C. Alec Guinness had a good line in “The Empire Strikes Back”, when he said that much of what we hold to be true depends on our point of view. This is especially important to consider in light of rogue scientists who will obscure or fabricate data, ignore variables, or withhold information to prevent others from subverting their personal agendas. They cannot prove what they believe, so they fit the data to their preconceived notions.

Despite the deception and delusions, the truth is not offended. Some day, we may come to know it, and then those who sowed lies will be refuted and lose whatever glory they thought they had.

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