Wheat in China

Dr. Michael Eades linked to an interesting study yesterday on his Health and Nutrition blog. It's entitled "Vegetable-Rich Food Pattern is Related to Obesity in China."

It's one of these epidemiological studies where they try to divide subjects into different categories of eating patterns and see how health problems associate with each one. They identified four patterns: the 'macho' diet high in meat and alcohol; the 'traditional' diet high in rice and vegetables; the 'sweet tooth' pattern high in cake, dairy and various drinks; and the 'vegetable rich' diet high in wheat, vegetables, fruit and tofu. The only pattern that associated with obesity was the vegetable-rich diet. The 25% of people eating closest to the vegetable-rich pattern were more than twice as likely to be obese as the 25% adhering the least.

The authors of the paper try to blame the increased obesity on a higher intake of vegetable oil from stir-frying the vegetables, but that explanation is juvenile and misleading. A cursory glance at table 3 reveals that the vegetable-eaters weren't eating any more fat than their thinner neighbors. Dr. Eades suggests that their higher carbohydrate intake (+10%) and higher calorie intake (+120 kcal/day) are responsible for the weight gain, but I wasn't satisfied with that explanation so I took a closer look.

One of the most striking elements of the 'vegetable-rich' food pattern is its replacement of rice with wheat flour. The 25% of the study population that adhered the least to the vegetable-rich food pattern ate 7.3 times more rice than wheat, whereas the 25% sticking most closely to the vegetable-rich pattern ate 1.2 times more wheat than rice! In other words, wheat flour had replaced rice as their single largest source of calories. This association was much stronger than the increase in vegetable consumption itself!

All of a sudden, the data make perfect sense. Wheat seems to destroy the metabolism of cultures wherever it goes. I think the reason we don't see the same type of association in American epidemiological studies is that everyone eats wheat. Only in a culture that has a true diversity of diet can you find a robust association like this. The replacement of rice with wheat may have caused the increase in calorie intake as well, subsequent to metabolic dysfunction. Clinical trials of low-carbohydrate diets as well as 'paleolithic diets' have shown good metabolic outcomes from wheat avoidance, although one can't be sure that wheat is the only culprit from those data.

I don't think the vegetables had anything to do with the weight gain, they were just incidentally associated with wheat consumption. But I do think these data argue against the commonly-held idea that vegetables protect against overweight.

Sorry to have been A.W.O.L.

Man, so much has been going on, and I have also had a new graphics card installed into my PC meaning I can at last play Sims2 YEAH! which is taking up and incredible amount of time... who knew I was that tragic huh?

Well, since being home I have managed to shift another bit of the holiday flab. I am now 15 stone 8 and a half pounds (218.5lbs) so a my tracker bar says up the top that's 33.5 pounds lost totally.

I have been having a seriously hard time since getting back. Eating has been a complete pain in the arse. Its just so annoying. The other totally annoying thing is that you CAN eat a load of shit like crisps, sweets and ice cream and wine. Great.

So I have been pretty good considering I can eat all that junk but have chosen not to.

So my Dad's cancer... Its all gone apparently so that's cool, but he went to see them on Friday and was hoping he would get a date for his colostomy reversal operation and that it could all be done before my brothers wedding on the 9th August. Sadly no. Its gonna be another couple of months yet. His MRSA has still not entirely healed up and its still weeping from the wound occasionally, so they wont even touch him if that's still there. So he was proper upset. Didn't help things that on Saturday I have my first Piano concert and recital for all my pupils. It was posh dress etc (pic of me and DS playing Darth Vader's Imperial March above on a wonderful grand piano!). Just after the concert finished my dads bag came apart. Its so ironic. they give him a new type of bag that will be easier to deal with and he can hopefully kind of forget about having it, and then it goes and breaks. Not leaks... breaks! Can you believe it? So they change it and its all a bit rubbish for him and stuff, but they deal with it.

We got home and we were just off to bed when Mum came dashing in saying the new bag had broken too! What?!?! We looked at the 3rd bag they brought just in case and it came apart in my hands. Poor Dad. So we had to phone the hospital and they sent the district nurse out. We had all had wine and beer, and none of us could drive so we had to sit and wait for her to come and she didn't get here till 3am. Bless her for it though as otherwise we would have had to tape a plastic bag to him!

Its not the cancer that is the problem with him, its the horrible side effects of the surgery. I mean, the last thing you want is a dodgy batch of bags on top of cancer and MRSA right? Jeeez.

Today he is back at the hospital to have the result of the biopsy on his tongue. He has an inch and a half chopped out of that the other week, so hopefully that will be good news. I don't think I can deal with any more. They seemed to think its a benign tumour, but who knows until you get down and test the thing right?

So the mill has been grinding for all of us rather a lot recently.

The concert went really well even though I was shitting myself. I played Bach's prelude in C Major and my sister played Gounod's Ave Maria on the cello as a duet and it was fabulous.

All my pupils played their bits so well and it was just wonderful.

So today I am back on track and I am going to try and have a good weight loss week. My bro's wedding is in 4 weeks, so I am going to try and at least be at my lowest weight again for that... which is 15 st 6 I think. Totally do-able.

laterz

Cancer in Other Non-Industrialized Cultures

In Cancer, Disease of Civilization (1960), Wilhjalmur Stefansson mentions a few cultures besides the Inuit in which large-scale searches never turned up cancer. Dr. Albert Schweitzer examined over 10,000 traditionally-living natives in Gabon (West Africa) in 1913 and did not find cancer. Later, it became common in the same population as they began "living more and more after the manner of the whites."

In Cancer, its Nature, Cause and Cure (1957), Dr. Alexander Berglas describes the search for cancer among natives in Brazil and Ecuador by Dr. Eugene Payne. He examined approximately 60,000 people over 25 years and found no evidence of cancer.

Sir Robert McCarrison conducted a seven year medical survey among the Hunza, in what is now Northern Pakistan. Among 11,000 people, he did not find a single case of cancer. Their diet consisted of soaked and sprouted grains and beans, fruit, vegetables, grass-fed dairy and a small amount of meat (including organs of course).

I no longer think of cancer as an inevitable risk of getting old, but as another facet of the disease of civilization.

31 New Recipes for LivingAfterWLS

Have you visited the LivingAfterWLS Kitchen lately? We have just added over 30 new recipes for your culinary enjoyment and healthy lifestyle.At left is our Neighborhood favorite, Parmesan Tuna Patties served with mango. Good for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Mortality and Lifespan of the Inuit

One of the classic counter-arguments that's used to discredit accounts of healthy hunter-gatherers is the fallacy that they were short-lived, and thus did not have time to develop diseases of old age like cancer. While the life expectancy of hunter-gatherers was not as high as ours today, most groups had a significant number of elderly individuals, who sometimes lived to 80 years and beyond. Mortality came mostly from accidents, warfare and infectious disease rather than chronic disease.

I found a a mortality table from the records of a Russian mission in Alaska (compiled by Veniaminov, taken from Cancer, Disease of Civilization), which recorded the ages of death of a traditionally-living Inuit population during the years 1822 to 1836. Here's a plot of the raw data:

Here's the data re-plotted in another way. I changed the "bin size" of the bars to 10 year spans each (rather than the bins above, which vary from 3 to 20 years). This allows us to get a better picture of the number of deaths over time. I took some liberties with the data to do this, breaking up a large bin equally into two smaller bins. I also left out the infant mortality data, which are interesting but not relevant to this post:


Excluding infant mortality, about 25% of their population lived past 60. Based on these data, the approximate life expectancy (excluding infant mortality) of this Inuit population was 43.5 years. It's possible that life expectancy would have been higher before contact with the Russians, since they introduced a number of nasty diseases to which the Inuit were not resistant. Keep in mind that the Westerners who were developing cancer alongside them probably had a similar life expectancy at the time. Here's the data plotted in yet another way, showing the number of individuals surviving at each age, out of the total deaths recorded:


It's remarkably linear. Here's the percent chance of death at each age:


In the next post, I'll briefly summarize cancer data from several traditionally-living cultures other than the Inuit.

Cancer Among the Inuit

I remember coming across a table in the book Eat, Drink and Be Healthy (by Dr. Walter Willett-- you can skip it) a few years back. Included were data taken from Dr. Ancel Keys' "Seven Countries Study". It showed the cancer rates for three industrialized nations: the US, Greece and Japan. Although specific cancers differed, the overall rate was remarkably similar for all three: about 90 cancers per 100,000 people per year. Life expectancy was also similar, with Greece leading the pack by 4 years (the data are from the 60s).

The conclusion I drew at the time was that lifestyle did not affect the likelihood of developing cancer. It was easy to see from the same table that heart disease was largely preventable, since the US had a rate of 189 per 100,000 per year, compared to Japan's 34. Especially since I also knew that Japanese-Americans who eat an American diet get heart disease just like European-Americans.

I fell prey to the same logic that is so pervasive today: the idea that you will eventually die of cancer if no other disease gets you first. It's easy to believe, since the epidemiology seems to tell us that lifestyle doesn't affect overall cancer rates very much. There's only one little glitch... those epidemiological studies compare the sick to the sicker.

Here's the critical fact that modern medicine seems to have forgotten: hunter-gatherers and numerous non-industrial populations throughout the world have vanishingly small cancer rates. This fact was widely accepted in the 19th century and the early 20th, but has somehow managed to fade into obscurity. I know it sounds unbelievable, but allow me to explain.

I recently read Cancer, Disease of Civilization by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (thanks Peter). It really opened my eyes. Stefansson was an anthropologist and arctic explorer who participated in the search for cancer among the Canadian and Alaskan Inuit. Traditionally, most Inuit groups were strictly carnivorous, eating a diet of raw and cooked meat and fish almost exclusively. Their calories came primarily from fat, roughly 80%. They alternated between seasons of low and high physical activity, and typically enjoyed an abundant food supply.

Field physicians in the arctic noted that the Inuit were a remarkably healthy people. While they suffered from a tragic susceptibility to European communicable diseases, they did not develop the chronic diseases we now view as part of being human: tooth decay, overweight, heart attacks, appendicitis, constipation, diabetes and cancer. When word reached American and European physicians that the Inuit did not develop cancer, a number of them decided to mount an active search for it. This search began in the 1850s and tapered off in the 1920s, as traditionally-living Inuit became difficult to find.

One of these physicians was captain George B. Leavitt. He actively searched for cancer among the traditionally-living Inuit from 1885 to 1907. Along with his staff, he performed 50,000 examinations a year for the first 15 years, and 25,000 a year thereafter. He did not find a single case of cancer. At the same time, he was regularly diagnosing cancers among the crews of whaling ships and other Westernized populations. It's important to note two relevant facts about Inuit culture: first, their habit of going shirtless indoors. This would make visual inspection for external cancers very easy. Second, the Inuit generally had great faith in Western doctors and would consult them even for minor problems. Therefore, doctors in the arctic had ample opportunity to inspect them for cancer.

A study was published in 1934 by F.S. Fellows in the U.S Treasury's Public Health Reports entitled "Mortality in the Native Races of the Territory of Alaska, With Special Reference to Tuberculosis". It contained a table of cancer mortality deaths for several Alaskan regions, all of them Westernized to some degree. However, some were more Westernized than others. In descending order of Westernization, the percent of deaths from cancer were as follows:


Keep in mind that all four of the Inuit populations in this table were somewhat Westernized. It's clear that cancer incidence tracks well with Westernization. By "Westernization", what I mean mostly is the adoption of European food habits, including wheat flour, sugar, canned goods and vegetable oil. Later, most groups also adopted Western-style houses, which incidentally were not at all suited to their harsh climate.

In the next post, I'll address the classic counter-argument that hunter-gatherers were free of cancer because they didn't live long enough to develop it.

Cancer and the Immune System

My understanding of cancer has changed radically over the past few months. I used to think of it as an inevitable consequence of aging, a stochastic certainty. The human body is made of about 50 trillion cells, many of which replicate their DNA and divide regularly. It's only a matter of time until one of those cells randomly accumulates the wrong set of mutations, and loses the molecular brakes that restrict uncontrolled growth.

Strictly speaking, the idea is correct. That is how cancer begins. However, there's another check in place that operates outside the cancer cell itself: the immune system. A properly functioning immune system can recognize and destroy cancerous cells before they become dangerous to the organism. In fact, your immune system has probably already controlled or destroyed a number of them in your lifetime.

I recently read a fascinating account of some preliminary findings from the lab of Dr. Zheng Cui at Wake Forest university. His group took blood samples from 100 people and purified a type of immune cell called the granulocyte. They then evaluated the granulocytes' ability to kill cervical cancer cells in a cell culture dish. They found that it varied dramatically from one individual to another. One person's granulocytes killed 97% of the cancer cells in 24 hours, while another person's killed 2%.

They found some important trends. Granulocytes from people over 50 years old had a reduced ability to kill cancer cells, as did granulocytes from people with cancer. This raises the possibility that cancer is not simply the result of getting too old, but a very specific weakening of the immune system.

The most important finding, however, was that the granulocytes' kung-fu grip declined dramatically during the winter months. Here's Dr. Cui:

Nobody seems to have any cancer-killing ability during the
winter months from November to April.

Hmm, I wonder why that could be?? Vitamin D anyone??

In the next post, I'll talk about cancer in non-industrialized cultures.