Just when I think the medical profession can’t sink any lower, it digs a trench a climbs in.

My previous post was about a new study claiming that surgery reverses diabetes more effectively than diet and drugs – the only problem, of course, was that the diet was the American Diabetes Association’s high-carbohydrate diet.  The study was set up to produce a better outcome for surgery.  That’s sinking pretty low.

Now here’s the new low:  Researchers are giving a diabetes drug to pregnant women, essentially drugging their unborn babies, in an attempt to prevent the babies from becoming obese.  Here are some quotes from an article in the U.K. Daily Mail:

In a world first, dangerously overweight mothers-to-be in four British cities have started taking a diabetes drug during their pregnancy. The doctors behind the controversial NHS trial say that obesity among pregnant women is reaching epidemic proportions and they need to act now to protect the health of tomorrow’s children.

Yes, they do need to act now.  They could start by telling pregnant women that the Eat Well Plate (the UK’s version of our USDA Food Plate) is a crock of @#$%.  Here’s what the official Eat Well site recommends:

• Plenty of fruit and vegetables
• Plenty of potatoes, bread, rice, pasta and other starchy foods
• Some milk and dairy foods
• Some meat, fish, eggs, beans and other non-dairy sources of protein
• Just a small amount of foods and drinks high in fat and/or sugar

So you’re an obese, insulin-resistant British mom-to-be, and you follow the Eat Well guidelines by eating plenty of fruit, plenty of starchy foods, and just a bit of meat and dairy.  Great.  You just sent your blood sugar through the roof.

I swear, every time I see these government goofballs put fat and sugar into the same category, I want to kidnap two of them, stuff a pound of sugar down one’s throat and a pound of lard down the other’s, then have them compare notes on the effects.  They might notice a slight difference.

However, there is likely to be unease about resorting to medication in pregnancy for a problem that can be treated through changes in diet and exercise.

Yes, this problem can be treated through changes in diet.  But not if the diet consists of plenty of fruit and plenty of potatoes, bread, rice, pasta and other starchy foods.

If the strategy is a success, the treatment could be in widespread use in as little as five years, with tens of thousands of overweight but otherwise healthy mothers-to-be drugged each year.

This will be a boon not just for the pharmaceutical industry, but for the paper industry as well.  Doctors will be going through prescription pads like crazy.

The Daily Mail recently revealed the rise of the ‘sumo baby’, with the number of newborns weighing more than 11lb soaring by 50 per cent over the last four years.

Remember the days when a big baby was considered a healthy baby?  Not anymore.  Now more and more babies are big because they’ve already been biochemically programmed to become obese.

The trial involves 400 pregnant women in Liverpool, Coventry, Sheffield and Edinburgh. They have started taking metformin, which has been safely used by diabetics for decades and is cleared for the treatment of diabetes in pregnancy. It costs just pence per tablet.

Okay, maybe not a huge boon to the pharmaceutical industry.  But tens of thousands of prescriptions will still add up to a tidy profit.

The study aims to exploit the ability of metformin to lower levels of the hormone insulin in the bloodstream. Obese women make more insulin than other mothers-to-be and this leads to a greater nutrition supply reaching the baby. It is hoped that lowering levels of insulin will reduce the supply and so cut the odds of babies being born obese.

What, they’re blaming high levels of insulin?  No, no, no .. insulin has nothing to do with becoming obese.  Just ask all those people who are calling Gary Taubes an idiot on their blogs.  The problem here is food reward.  The moms are eating too much palatable food, so their babies are sitting there in the womb thinking, “Dang, that’s good stuff!  Salty, sweet, fatty … delicious!  I’m going to open the spigot on my feeding tube and have another couple of servings!”

Study leader Professor Jane Norman of Edinburgh University said: ‘One of the challenges is that many women feel perfectly healthy but there is very good evidence that women who are obese have an increased risk of pregnancy problems and their babies are at risk, and we’d like to reduce that risk.’

Addressing concerns about unborn babies being medicated for a problem that many would say could be treated by diet and exercise, she said: ‘I absolutely support the improvement of diet and encouraging exercise. ‘But we are increasingly faced with women who start their pregnancy obese. Saying at that stage to eat less and exercise more is not particularly helpful.’

No, we shouldn’t be telling pregnant women to eat less.  We should be telling them to eat differently.  We should be telling them to adopt a diet that doesn’t pump their unborn babies full of insulin.  Giving pregnant women a drug to beat down their glucose and insulin levels when switching to a low-carb, high-fat diet will accomplish the same goal is just nuts.

p.s. — I apologize for going all day without checking comments.  I was juggling projects and just now got around to it.

In the speech I gave at the Office of Research Integrity conference, I listed this as the first ingredient for creating a crisis in nutrition:

Doctors, nutritionists, researchers, medical industry trade groups, government agencies and other established authorities handing out dietary advice that flat-out doesn’t work very well for an awful lot of people.

Today I saw another example of that ingredient in action.  A co-worker who heard from another co-worker that I know a thing or two about nutrition and health sent an email asking if he could drop by for a chat.  When we talked, he explained that he’s confused because his latest blood-work results aren’t good, even though he’s following the kind of “healthy” diet his doctor told him he should.

We’ll look at the results in a moment.  First let’s look at his typical diet, which he printed out for me.

Morning
Water, lime and honey (2 glasses), two egg-white omelet with little salt, 1 chili.

Breakfast
Oatmeal with water and fat-free milk, glass of fat-free milk
or
Milkshake with fat-free protein powder, fat-free milk, orange juice, fiber, blue berries, black berries, strawberries

Lunch
Bunch of carrots, cucumber, tomato, 1/2 cup rice and curry
or
Spaghetti and vegetables

Snack
Wheat bread or plain bagel with jam (fat free), peanut butter.

Dinner
Two whole-wheat tortillas, curry, apple or another fruit, 1 glass fat free milk.  (The curry is usually vegetable curry, but includes a little chicken cooked in olive oil twice per week.)
or
Spaghetti and vegetables

Snack
Mix of cashews, almonds and raisins

Now there’s a diet that would make your average doctor or dietician stand up and cheer!  Mostly plant-based, egg whites instead of whole eggs, fat-free milk instead of whole milk, very low in fat, devoid of red meat, lots of vegetables, and high in “good” carbohydrates:  oatmeal, orange juice, fruit, rice, whole-wheat bread, whole-wheat tortillas, and spaghetti.  This is the kind of diet the USDA believes everyone should be eating — and by gosh, we probably would if only we weren’t so gluttonous …  or so stupid that the Food Pyramid confuses us.  It’s also the kind of diet the USDA is pushing in schools.

Now let’s look at a couple of my co-worker’s lipid panels.

Two years ago
Total cholesterol: 212
LDL: 133
HDL: 46
Triglycerides: 161

Two weeks ago
Total cholesterol: 212
LDL: 140
HDL: 38
Triglycerides: 168

Notice anything?  The guy has been following the diet he was told is good for him, but his triglycerides are up and his HDL is down.  Those numbers may not look particularly alarming individually, but his triglycerides/HDL ratio is pretty bad.

For those of you who don’t already know, the most reliable predictor of heart disease you can calculate from a lipid panel is the triglycerides/HDL ratio.  You want that ratio below 3.0, preferably below 2.0.  If the ratio is above 3.0, it’s more likely that your body is producing small, dense LDL.  If the ratio is below 2.0, it’s more likely that your body is producing large, fluffy LDL.  A high ratio can also be an indicator that you’re becoming insulin resistant.

Thanks to that diet full of “good” carbohydrates and low in fat, my co-worker’s triglycerides/HDL ratio is 4.42.  And by the way, he’s a lean guy:  5’5”, 142 pounds.  Nobody can blame these lousy results on overeating or being overweight.  As he told me, his doctor is a bit frustrated as well, seeing those lousy numbers in a lean guy who eats a “healthy” low-fat diet.

In my speech, I talked about a common sequence in the treatment of type 2 diabetes:  a doctor tells a patient to start following the American Diabetes Association diet, the patient does, his blood sugar continues to spiral out of control, so the doctor prescribes a drug.  Frankly, I don’t know how any doctor with a functioning brain can recommend the ADA diet and then be surprised at the lousy results.  A diet based on foods that are rapidly converted to glucose raises fasting glucose levels?  Duh!

But I understand why doctors believe a low-fat diet will reduce triglycerides, since triglycerides are fats.  What they fail to realize is that high fasting triglycerides are a response to excess carbohydrates.  Here’s Dr. William Davis, the author of Wheat Belly, explaining the process:

One of the most common triglyceride myths is that eating fats increases triglyceride. But that’s only a half-truth, since fats do indeed increase triglycerides-but only if triglycerides are measured after eating (i.e., in the postprandial period). The real story is that fats in the diet decrease triglycerides-at all other times except after a meal. The higher the fat content of your diet, the lower your triglycerides will be in a fasting blood draw. This has been well-established in numerous diet trials comparing low-fat with low-carbohydrate diets.

Here’s where it gets confusing: While dietary fats cause triglycerides to increase after eating, carbohydrates cause triglycerides to increase at all other times. This means that carbohydrates (starches), like breads, pasta, breakfast cereals, pretzels, crackers, potatoes, soft drinks, and candies increase fasting triglycerides if consumed habitually.

A carbohydrate food like bread actually contains very little triglyceride . . .  So why would bread cause triglycerides to increase? Because carbohydrates are converted to triglycerides in the liver.

The human body has little capacity to store carbohydrates. So it needs a method to store the energy of excessive carbohydrates. It does so by converting carbohydrates to triglycerides, which are then converted to fat, especially the fat in your abdominal region (visceral fat).

Not surprisingly, the quickest way to reduce high fasting triglycerides is to cut back on the carbohydrates.  The easiest way to raise HDL is to eat more fat (natural fat, that is).  But since most doctors don’t know that, they see someone with a lipid panel like my co-worker’s and immediately recommend a low-fat diet with lots of fruit and whole grains.  In other words, they hand out dietary advice that doesn’t work.  When the dietary advice fails, as it did for my co-worker, they reach for the prescription pad.

That’s why we have a crisis in nutrition.  That’s why the advice the “experts” are handing out has to change.

Back in April, I posted part of an email from a Fat Head fan I happen to have met in person, since he lives nearby:

My six-year-old niece Megan started school yesterday, her first day of school. She was already scared and upset and crying. After lunch, she went into orbit, threw up everywhere because she was so upset, and ultimately had to leave school. My brother, who has been looking desperately for work, had to cancel a “sure thing” job interview to go get her because the school was sending her home. Here’s the word from my dad on what happened:

What prompted the whole issue yesterday was Meagan’s teacher taking her lunch, which she had brought from home, away from her.  David [my brother] had packed yogurt and fresh fruit, which Meagan likes.  Her teacher told her mother that the school has to ensure that the children have a nutritious lunch, so they took Meagan’s yogurt and fruit and insisted she eat a corn dog.  What a brilliant plan from a so-called “educator.”

At the time, a couple of other readers wondered if the story was true.  I understand their doubt … after all, this doesn’t sound like something that should ever happen in a supposedly free country.

Well, we can put any lingering doubts to rest, because it happened again this week in a story that was widely reported.  Here’s part of a newspaper account:

A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because the school told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.

The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the person who was inspecting all lunch boxes in the More at Four classroom that day.

The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs – including in-home day care centers – to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home. When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones.

That’s not a lunch I’d pack for my girls, but of course that’s not the issue here.  The issue is:  why the @#$% is some bozo from the federal government telling a mom in North Carolina what she may and may not pack in her own kid’s lunch?  And why are putting up with it?

The girl’s mother – who said she wishes to remain anonymous to protect her daughter from retaliation – said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a “healthy lunch” would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.

Well, that’s just peachy that the school will “offer” the missing foods.  The only problem is that when government officials make you an “offer,” it’s an offer you can’t refuse.

“Hi, we’re from the government, and we’d like to offer you this approved lunch.”

“No thanks.”

“You don’t understand.  We’re offering it to you.”

“Yeah, I got that.  But I don’t want it.  My kid won’t eat that stuff anyway.”

“Madam, let’s try this again.  We’re offering you this lunch.”

“Uh … no thanks?”

“That will be $1.25.  If you don’t pay, there will be a series of demands and further fines.  If you choose to ignore them, this process will culminate with armed men showing up at your door.  We are the government, after all.  Now, would you like to take us up on our offer?”

WARNING:  HERE COMES THE POLITICAL RANT

One of the great mysteries I’ve yet to solve is the people I’ve met who fully understand how badly our government screwed up the official dietary guidelines, fully understand that the USDA is far more interested in selling particular agricultural products than in promoting health, and yet still believe a big, powerful, intrusive government is necessary to prevent people from engaging in behaviors or making decisions some of us don’t happen to like.  Then, after voting to grant government officials the power to insert themselves into our lives, they are shocked – shocked! – that the USDA would order school kids to pack a lunch that includes foods some of us may not want our kids to eat.

Here’s my question for those people:  What the @#$% did you think was going to happen?!! This kind of nonsense from a government empowered to sticks its nose in everyone’s business is not only unsurprising, it’s utterly predictable.

Yes, yes, I can hear the retorts already … oh, well, sure, but we still the government to regulate our food supply … blah-blah-blah …  government needs to help the stupid people who don’t know any better … blah-blah-blah … if we can just get the USDA to changes its policies … blah-blah-blah  … we just need to get the right people in there  … blah-blah-blah.

I’ve got news for you:  we’ll never get the right people in there.  The right people have no interest in wielding that kind of power over others.

People who’ve never read a single book on libertarianism and yet (stunningly) nonetheless imagine they know what libertarians think like to paint us as starry-eyed dreamers who believe businessmen are all kind-hearted angels … whereas they (not sharing our blissful ignorance) understand that without federal agencies issuing and enforcing a gazillion regulations, big bad business would run roughshod over us all.

That is not what libertarians believe.  The seminal work on free-market economics was The Wealth of Nations, written by Adam Smith in 1776.  Smith actually had a rather low opinion of the merchant class.  In chapter after chapter, he shared his observation that people (including merchants) operate out of their own self-interest, period.  Or if you prefer a more negative connotation, people act out of greed.

What Smith (unlike many contemporaries) also recognized is that government regulators are just self-interested as everyone else.  When governments are granted the power to regulate economic activities, he warned, it’s only a matter of time before the greedy businessmen and the greedy government regulators get together and screw the rest of us for their own benefit.  By stifling freedom and competition, regulators can make their hand-picked producers (and themselves) richer, while making the rest of the population poorer by denying them products that are better or cheaper or both.

Take government’s coercive powers out of the equation and all a merchant can do to you is offer you a product and hope you buy it.  (We’re talking about a genuine offer here, not the kind of “offer” we get from government officials.)  That requires businesses to compete with each other for customers, which in turn leads to better products, better service, lower prices, innovation and higher productivity.  In short, Smith argued that the economic system that produces the most wealth and the highest degree of consumer satisfaction is one based on voluntary exchanges – free markets.  Economic freedom makes the natural greed of the merchant work in our favor.

The attorneys who buy my docketing software can attest to this.  I produced a better, cheaper docketing system for trademark and patent attorneys.  I undercut my competition.  I did this not because I love attorneys, but because I want their money.  The attorneys benefited from my self-interest and “greed.”

Despite what some people will tell you, a market system based on voluntary exchanges does not mean that evil businessmen are allowed to screw people and get away with it.  If a business defrauds you, you didn’t volunteer for that.  If a product turns out to be faulty, you didn’t get what you agreed to buy, which means you didn’t volunteer for that.   If a product kills or maims you, you didn’t volunteer for that.  In any of those situations, the business should be rigorously punished.  That’s the government’s legitimate job – to protect you from violence and fraud.

A free market simply means that if I want to sell you a product or service and you want to buy it, no third party gets to step in and prevent us from making that voluntary exchange.  It also means no one gets to force us to make exchanges we don’t want to make … like, say, being ordered to buy a USDA-approved lunch for our children.

So what does all this economic theory have to do with the USDA and our inability to get the right people running it?  I’m getting to that.  Be patient.

As the great economics writer Thomas Sowell has pointed out many times, government agencies created to regulate a particular industry nearly always end up being run by muckety-mucks from that same industry – who then create policies to benefit the industry as whole or particular segments operating within it.  We just saw that again recently when Obama appointed an executive from Monsanto – one of the worst corporations on the planet — to a high-level post in the USDA.

So why does this always seem to happen?  Why do the foxes always seem to end up guarding the henhouse?  Why can’t we get the right people in those agencies?

It all gets back to people acting in their own self-interest.

Once a government acquires the power to regulate an industry, it also has the ability to rig the game in ways that can be worth millions to particular corporations or segments of that industry.  Being self-interested (and certainly not being stupid), the muckety-mucks from that industry recognize that if they can leverage government’s coercive powers, they can enrich themselves.   Are there competitors we don’t like?  No problem … we just need some health and safety regulations that cripple them.  Is our industry faltering, or just not making as much profit as we’d like?  Simple … we declare what we produce a public necessity and get some generous government subsidies.  In other words, if we can just take away other people’s freedom to engage in voluntary exchanges and make their own decisions, we can do really, really well for ourselves!

To acquire this economic leverage, the muckety-mucks buy political influence through campaign contributions, junkets to exotic places, or offers of lucrative jobs for retiring politicians and regulators.  The politicians and regulators are happy to let themselves be bought – it’s in their self-interest, after all.  In many cases, generous industry donors end up being rewarded by seeing their executives placed in high positions with regulatory agencies.  Those regulators certainly aren’t going to risk pissing off the industry that placed them in their jobs – after all, they’ll probably return to that industry when their government “service” is over.  It’s in their self-interest to play along.

If only some crazed regulator would actually stand up and declare, “I’m issuing this regulation to please the people who bought my influence with their hard-earned dollars,” I might the find practice barely tolerable.  But of course, that’s never what we’re told.  We’re told the gazillion new regulations issued every year are necessary to protect the public.  Riiiiight.

Protecting the public is the nominal excuse for all kinds of ridiculous legislation.  Back when fellow comedian Tim Slagle and I were producing a political comedy show called The Slagle-Naughton Report, one of our bits highlighted a new regulation in Illinois that made it illegal to charge a fee to braid someone’s hair without first attending beauty school and obtaining a license.  The regulation was rammed through at the behest of – you guessed it – beauty-shop owners who didn’t like the competition from cheap hair-braiding salons run by (horrors!) unqualified people — otherwise known as “poor people” and “immigrants.”

Now … can anyone explain to me exactly what threat to public health this regulation was intended to avoid?  (Our bit ended with Slagle announcing, “In a related story, five people were rushed to Northwestern Hospital this week with bad braids.”)  If you don’t like the way your hair was braided, you undo the braids and stop patronizing that shop.  End of story.  But thanks to a bit of influence-buying, the beauty-shop owners got their regulation passed … to protect the public, of course.

Over time, officially-sanctioned coercive power nearly always ends up in the wrong hands.  That’s why we’ll never, ever get the right people running the USDA.   The USDA  is now and always will be largely populated by people from the grain industry.  They will happily subsidize grains with your tax dollars, then happily order all schools, prisons, military bases and every other government institution to serve grains at every meal … an instant, huge, lucrative, reliable market, all created with the stroke of a legislative pen.  The industry is happy, the politicians are happy, and the contributions and post-Washington job offers will keep flowing.

And here’s the real kicker:  Most of these people probably consider themselves good public servants.  As Milton Friedman noted in one of his books, people have an inexhaustible capacity to believe that whatever is good for them personally is also good for the public at large.  Human beings are geniuses at justifying their own behavior.  (I was made even more aware of this after having children.)

You and I can be angry about it, we can bang our heads on our desks about it, we can blog about it, Facebook and Twitter about it, but we will never be able to out-bribe the likes of Monsanto, ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland.  As long as the federal government has the power to order kids to include particular items in their school lunches, Big Food and Big Agriculture will always end up writing (if indirectly) the rules.

That’s why pizza is still counted as a vegetable.  That’s why if the big dairy producers in your state don’t want you buying raw milk from local farmers, raw milk will be declared a health hazard and banned.  That’s why whole milk is banned in schools, while low-fat chocolate milk sweetened with garbage produced by the Corn Refiners is okay.  And that’s why the parents of school kids are told if they don’t pack a government-approved lunch, they’ll be fined.

We will never change this nonsense by trying to convince the USDA their dietary advice is misguided.  They can’t be convinced.  It’s not in their interest to be convinced.   The only cure is to take away their power — and you will never take away the government’s power by asking it to pretty please do the right thing and only take away the freedoms you personally don’t think other people should have.  You take away government’s power by telling it @#$% off and leave all of us alone unless we’re actually harming someone.

In short, if you support government controlling other people’s choices, you have no right to complain when your choices end up on the verboten list.  Sieg Heil!

Okay, I’m done ranting … for now.

(Note to Rick Perry:  the next time a debate moderator asks you which three federal agencies you’d dissolve, the third item on your list should be the USDA.  Given that absolutely everybody needs to eat, I think it’s extremely unlikely we’d stop producing enough food if the industry were left to free-market forces.)

I haven’t had time to post on Paula Deen’s status as a new celebrity diabetic, but the Older Brother did a nice job over on his blog.

I’m busy tonight with a hairy data conversion for one of my software clients,  so this is a short post.

I don’t know if this is pathetic, funny, a positive sign, or a combination of all three:  The makers of Karo corn syrup would like you to know that their product doesn’t contain any high fructose corn syrup.

I found this photo while going over my collection from Christmas. My mom had a bottle of this stuff in her kitchen, apparently to put in some kind of Christmas dessert I didn’t eat.  (If memory serves, we used to put dark Karo syrup on our waffles during my sugar-laden childhood.)

In case you’re wondering about the difference, high fructose corn syrup undergoes an extra step in which enzymes convert more of the glucose from the corn into fructose to make it sweeter.

I recommend you avoid corn syrup of either variety.

Over the weekend, I happened to catch this news segment while nursing my morning coffee. Take a look:

It’s nice that the Senate is encouraging more people to be “aware” of Crohn’s and colitis, but I was already aware of them. I used to suffer bouts of colitis as a teenager and young adult.

I wasn’t aware, however, that rates of Crohn’s and colitis are on the rise.  After viewing this segment, I did a little online searching and found some articles on the topic.  Here’s one:

Inflammatory bowel disease on the rise in kids

The reason more children being diagnosed with ‘adult’ disease is a mystery

For 10-year-old Jacob Krause, getting ready for the new school year wasn’t a simple matter of back-to-school shopping. It also involved working out logistics for getting to the bathroom as many as 20 times during a single school day.

The Clarksville Elementary School fifth-grader has severe ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease that increasingly, and somewhat mysteriously, strikes children.

The number of children afflicted by colitis and another inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn’s disease, has increased 50 percent in the past decade, according to the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America. About 1.5 million Americans suffer from colitis and Crohn’s, about 10 percent of them under the age of 18.

“We’re seeing younger and younger children getting it over time,” said Dr. Maria Oliva-Hemker, chief of the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine’s division of pediatric gastroenterology and nutrition.

The reasons for the increase are not clear. But many researchers believe something in the environment must be behind the surge in pediatric colitis, Crohn’s and other autoimmune diseases, which have been on the rise generally.

Hmmm … environmental causes … has anything in our environment changed significantly over the past 20 to 30 years?

One theory is that as the developed world has become more hygienic, the body has become less practiced at fighting off bugs — and more vulnerable to autoimmune diseases, in which the body attacks its own cells or tissues.

“Since we know [inflammatory bowel disease] is found in more developed countries, it must be something about the exposures that we are seeing in our day-to-day lives,” Oliva-Hemker said. “Probably the fact that we are a more hygienic society, the fact that children, even at an early age, are kept in very clean environments — not necessarily outside, playing in the dirt, being exposed to very low levels of routine viruses.”

Ahhh, yes, that must be it! Children are getting digestive disorders because we’re too darned clean. Thank goodness we just moved to a farm where my girls like to run around outside and return home dirty. Now if I can just talk Chareva out of insisting that the girls take a bath afterwards, they can avoid ruining their digestive systems through excess hygiene.

Here’s another article on the recent rise of intestinal disorders:

Baffling Rise of Intestinal Disorder in the Young

Crohn’s disease, a serious disorder of the intestines, appears to be increasing sharply among children, a trend that may reflect some unknown influence of Western industrial civilization, a British scientist said yesterday at a scientific symposium in Houston.

”It’s almost as if the infection-free environment of modern Western society could be a factor,” said Dr. John Walker-Smith of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, an expert on intestinal diseases of children.

In a telephone interview, Dr. Ferguson said that the excellent health records compiled through the National Health Service in Britain had allowed her to chart a dramatic and unexplained increase in Crohn’s disease among children in Scotland over 15 years.

Dr. Walker-Smith said it was possible that the decline of many childhood infections might allow children in the West to grow up without the vigorous development of their immune defense systems that such infections would ordinarily promote.

Dr. Walker-Smith admitted that this is speculation, but he noted that the increase in the disease among children was real and there was evidence indicating that something in the modern Western environment or experience might be involved.

Once again, the possible explanation offered is that our kids are so clean and so free of infections, they’re no longer developing immunities early in life to whatever mysterious bugs cause Crohn’s and colitis.

Interesting hypothesis. Although I have to wonder: since Crohn’s and colitis are still rising in developed countries — where hygiene has been good and rates of childhood infections have low for many decades now –- doesn’t it seem likely that these digestive-tract diseases are caused by something kids in developed countries regularly digest … such as mutant wheat?

In Wheat Belly, Dr. William Davis cites a study which showed that rates of celiac are four times higher now than 50 years ago. (That’s actual prevalence of the disease –- not diagnosis.) We also know that people who suffer from celiac are also more likely to suffer from other digestive ailments such as Crohn’s and colitis.  So we can reasonably speculate (but not conclude) that whatever causes celiac also causes or aggravates these other digestive issues.

Considering that kids are eating wheat products that contain both more gluten overall and mutant gluten with a protein sequence that never existed until around 40 years ago, I think it’s entirely possible that Crohn’s and colitis are on the rise because kids (and adults) are consuming glutens their bodies can’t handle.  These are, after all, auto-immune diseases.  It’s not unreasonable to suspect that when these strange glutens seep in our systems, our bodies attack them and end up attacking our own tissues at the same time.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard from quite a few people whose digestive ailments went away when they stopped eating grains – including the sound engineer for Fat Head, who told me watching the film changed his life.  He no longer needs a daily dose of Prilosec to get through the day.

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to always keep a bottle of Pepto-Bismal in my medicine cabinet and carried the tablet version whenever I traveled. Now I haven’t had a dose of the stuff in years — not since cutting way back on grains.

In the newsclip, Dr. Marion mentioned that new molecules and new medications are being developed to treat Crohn’s and colitis. Fine, but treating a disease isn’t the same as avoiding it in the first place.  It would be nice if some of the research dollars chasing new medications were directed towards determining if the mutant grain we now call “wheat” is behind the rise in digestive diseases.

But I don’t expect that happen, not in a country where grains are big business and the federal government subsidizes wheat farmers. Look at what happened when school-lunch guidelines called for fewer fried potatoes.  Politicians from potato-growing states rushed in and demanded changes in the guidelines.

The Senate may want us to all be aware of Crohn’s and colitis, but I seriously doubt farm-state senators will want us to also be aware that modern wheat may be causing them. We’ll have to spread that message ourselves.