I recently did a written interview for the website Bizymoms.com. It was the first time I had been invited to do an interview, so I figured what the heck. They bravely posted the interview, despite the fact that my responses could be seen as controversial. You can find it
here.
42 comments:
Thanks for the information about your interview Stephan. I read thru it.
I am eagerly waiting for your interview with Jimmy Moore slated for Mar 25th 2010.
Thanks
~ Venkat
Nice summary! But you forgot to mention gogi berries.
Genetically modified foods have probably saved over a billion lives. I guess it depends what you mean by genetically modified, but I'm referring to advancements done by those like Norman Borlaug. I'm not sure if you're against Burbank style crossbreeding as well, but our grandparents probably would have starved without it.
WELL DONE Stephan.
Brave, understandable, useful advice, and to the point.
The question on antioxidants was a precise one, and your answer was caveated using the reference point of a nutritious diet, and is therefore unarguable in the generality.
It is difficult to be both nuanced and informative in limited words, and the role of oxidation in the body is a massive subject.
The question has to be asked if supplementation of minerals vitamin D etc is going to become a pragmatic necessity because of our changing life styles and what we are doing to the crops and soil.
Vitamin D and minerals are not viewed as antioxidants in health shop terms but have roles in the oxidative/anti-oxidative processes in the body.
Awesome interview, Stephan. A great one to point newbies toward if they have basic questions about health and nutrition. You should do these more often!
I guess I've lost my sense of sense since I began researching and transitioning to a whole foods diet, because I can't see why anything you said could be contraversial. I think you've summed up solid dietary advice in a short, easy to understand way. I think if anyone asks me anything on diet I'll just email them this link.
Great interview! I only take issue with GMOs - while I agree there is not much use for them in the US - they do have their place in other countries with large, dense populations, and where growing food is difficult. Norman Borlaug's work with creating high yield crop cultivars brought about the Green Revolution and arguably saved a billion lives.
Stephan, I just wish Bizymoms had addressed you as "Dr." Or at least mentioned your doctorate.
I know how hard you worked for it.
[I don't usually care what people call me, as long as it's not an unjustified insult.]
-Steve
"...I'm referring to advancements done by those like Norman Borlaug"
Bryan, I'm confident you're aware that creating plant hybrids is not the same thing as inserting genes from bacteria and frogs into plants.
I have nothing against GMO per se. But Stephan is correct. Genetic modification has given us two things: herbicide resistance and pest resistance. The one exception was golden rice but vitamin A tabs are cheaper and probably much more effective.
GMO technology also comes with potential problems (many of them not conclusively proven, I'll admit) including food allergies (there is actually some evidence for this in the medical literature going back to 1996 -- it's not just the ranting of a bunch of ignorant hippies), and swift evolution of resistance among the weeds and insects against which we are using glyphosate and bT, already beginning to be documented. Really the same principle as resistance to anything, such as antibiotics and DDT, also well-documented. Such technology can be useful but has its limits and is not a long-term solution to world hunger -- and certainly not malnutrition.
There is a lot going on behind the scenes and the public (and everyone else for that matter) does not understand the uncertainties in this research, which many scientists are only too eager to conceal for the sake of their own narrow goals. Some of my colleagues ended up having to leave the field of plant pathology because they felt there was pressure on them to distort the research results. There were instances in which they had no idea what was going on in terms of gene silencing, potential post-transcriptional modification, etc. but they were pressured to keep that quiet and to oversimplify the results. For over a year during my PhD, I worked as a technician in a lab where the end goal was to engineer plants to sense anthrax. There was so much "stretching of the truth" to the granting agency it was ridiculous. Eventually I had to leave, partly for my own intellectual integrity. For many of these professors, it's all about prestige and keeping the grant money flowing in. If they can hide behind the pretense of helping humanity, they will.
Of course, these are all interesting scientific questions and they should be studied, but not under false pretenses.
To continue.
I have a PhD in mycology and used to sit in on industry-sponsored lunches (Syngenta, Monsanto) for grad students, since mycology and plant pathology are allied fields. I can honestly say that the people working in these fields seem to believe they are doing good work and that it is keeping humankind from starvation. However, they (and I at the time) were blinded by a very reductionistic view in which human health is not viewed through an evolutionary framework. All they do is look at what effect this or that gene has on the growth of a plant, and assume that if we can grow more plants, well then, that must be better for us all. It's all about plant yield (even to the neglect of micronutrients in the plants). Sad to say, the biologists who do this work are completely ignorant of human biology. Most registered dieticians are ignorant of human biology, too -- plant biologists are even moreso.
Maybe such technology keeps people from immediately starving, but at what cost? Any child fed a diet of GMOs is going to have severe nutritional deficiencies, including problems myelinating his/her brain, leading to a lifetime of health problems -- not because GMOs are inherently bad, but because that type of engineering hasn't given us anything but foods that aren't fit for humans to even eat in the first place, such as corn, soy, and wheat. Those crops are, at best, a short-term answer during acute crises, not a long-term solution. The problem is that they are being treated as a long-term solution.
There is really only one answer to world hunger and malnutrition "problems" and that is for people to have access to real food. Real food is for the most part perishable and so it will have to necessarily be sourced locally or at least regionally in the developing world that currently does not have the capital to pay for transporting those foods. Eventually, economic development would allow them to participate as consumers in a global market.
Imagine if we'd had a completely different scenario where 1) human nutritional needs were understood in an evolutionary light, and 2) taxpayers weren't pouring billions of extorted dollars into subsidized crops to "feed the world" in the sense of Earl Butz and George McGovern. What would it look like?
Corn, soy, and wheat would still be around but because they would have had to compete in a free(r) market, they would not have displaced traditional foods in foreign countries. Note that for unsubsidized crops, third-world sourced items are almost always cheaper than that grown in the US, which sustains their local economies. It's not that the third world can't feed itself. Hell, it's feeding us a good portion of the time. No, they have to endure an unfree market that shoves wheat, corn, and soy down their throats (almost literally), foisted upon them by international "free trade" regulatory bodies like the IMF and World Bank.
A great interview, and if I get distracted before I'm able to directly tell Bizymoms, it's great they posted the interview. This is controversial stuff.
As the parent of a elementary school student with some GI issues I spend a lot of time hearing the gospel of low-fat, high carb diets both in the school and the Doctor's office. It's subtle. No one is directly asking me what I'm feeding my child. A good thing since I don't want to get into protracted discussions about nutrition. Doctors tend to be wary of parents who google. But low fat and whole grains in addition to fruits and veggies are stressed. Schools are on the front lines of the obesity crisis and I can see it clearly in the messages given to parents and children.
I wonder if as time goes on and manufactured gluten free foods catch-up to what's considered a normal diet, if we won't see fewer people who are losing weight by giving up wheat. Right now going wheat free means making dramatic changes to the foods and quantities one eats. It's still tough to replace common wheat products one-to-one with wheat-free products. But it's getting easier every day.
Great points, Monica. There's a simple solution to all of this: remove the corn/wheat/soy subsidies that keep them artificially cheap and keep real foods artificially expensive, and cut out government funding of science research.
"There's a simple solution to all of this"
Getting rid of so much inertia caused by government intervention certainly would help, since developments would have to stand or fall on their own merit, but it also wouldn't guarantee success, if success is merely defined as discovering the truth.
That's because the scientific community (really, the broader academic community) doesn't necessarily police its own, even when the funding is from private sources or the research is done in private universities. It would take a long time to "fix", even in a free market -- if you could sustain a free market long enough for it to work -- because it would require a significant proportion of scientists and intellectuals to have a proper epistemology.
I've done some thinking on what would be required to foster more intellectual integrity in scientific research, but I haven't come up with any easy answers. At the very least, it would require a very different system of rewards than what we currently have. Tenure track would probably have to be eliminated, and many other aspects of academia would need reform, including the peer review process and how research funding is allocated. For a moment, forget even whether that funding is private or public. We have private funding and private universities now. After 10 years in academia, I cannot honestly say that the intellectual honesty issue is determined by funding. The problem was equally bad in both universities I studied and worked in -- one was public, one was private, both with a mix of federal, state, and private funding for research projects.
Ironically, based on my own experience in academia, I think that research that is the most basic and least "applied" tends to be the least susceptible to manipulation and dishonesty. I'm open to persuasion, but I still think this problem would exist in a free market, regardless of who was funding the research. A lot of what is driving these problems is both the desire for prestige on the part of scientists and a focus on very short-range, rather than long-range, goals on the part of industry. (Very few businesses think past the next quarter, precisely because they have poor epistemological methods.) Scientific accuracy would no doubt improve under a free market, but unless most individuals have a better epistemology, the situation won't improve nearly as much as it could. The prestige issue is there for both basic and applied projects, but I actually think it is worse in applied science.
And in terms of implementation? Heck, most citizens have a piss-poor epistemology. They are willing to wade through life evading reality and the consequences of their actions in all sorts of ways. If just 10% of the population currently ate "paleo" and their health problems mostly disappeared in short order, how long do you think it would take for the rest of population to implement? I'm pessimistic.
I'm not trying to be a downer, and I know that you and I are basically on the same page, Brian. But there are a surprising number of individuals who don't behave in a rationally self-interested way, and wouldn't even in a more free market situation where they had to deal with the full consequences of their decisions. (That wouldn't be our immediate problem, but I do mention that to point out that implementation of a free market won't give people good epistemological methods or a life-promoting philosophy. And the former can't be sustained long-term without the latter.)
All that said, this is not to minimize interviews like these that are getting the word out to interested members of the public still willing to think independently.
Stephan, you wrote "Ironically, big doses of antioxidants can actually increase oxidation under certain circumstances."
I'm aware that extremely high serum levels of ascorbate (only attainable through IV infusion) have a prooxidant effect on cancer cells, which don't have enough catalase and glutathione to deal with the ascorbate radical and H2O2 that are formed. Normal cells, however, are essentially unaffected. So the two-faced antioxidant/prooxidant nature of ascorbate can be seen as a great thing.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18678913
So in the case of vitamin C, warning that high doses can have prooxidant effects seems silly (correct me if I'm overlooking something!) Do you know whether other antioxidants can have prooxidant effects at more "normal" serum or tissue levels?
Stephan,
I've read your blog regularly the last few months and really appreciate it. I've also gone back and read some of your older articles and it's clear your thinking has become more refined on a lot of topics. This interview seems to be a nice distillation of your current thinking on food and good health.
However, on one point I was a little confused. In the interview, you recommend: "Prioritize foods rich in fiber such as leafy greens".
So I searched your blog entries looking for some justification behind this point.
It seems your most recent post (that I could find anyway) is neutral to slightly negative on high fiber.
So I'm curious why you're now recommending lots of leafy greens.
Thank you.
Okay, I think I found the post where you had a change of heart on fiber.
Still I'm curious why you specifically call out leafy greens. What about other non-wheat sources of fiber such as beans, nuts, and fruit?
Thanks
"Losing weight is not about burning calories."
The best line in the interview, IMO. Now if only more people could get this.
Brian
Great interview. Hope to see more such.
Hi Steve,
I hadn't even noticed. I'm not too concerned about it.
Hi Tom,
I don't know about vitamin C. But there have been concerns that high doses of vitamin E can be a pro-oxidant:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1132016/
Some dietary antioxidants cause the body to down-regulate endogenous antioxidants. Whether this is "good" or "bad" is a matter of interpretation. My bias is that the body's own antioxidants are likely to be more effective/beneficial than unnaturally high doses of dietary antioxidants.
http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Doi=71242
Hi Jay,
I still think there are concerns with grain fiber, particularly if it hasn't been fermented. The DART trail mostly supplemented grain fiber. By the way, the initial result was not statistically significant, but on follow-up several years later, they found that the fiber-supplemented group had a significantly higher mortality than the unsupplemented group (although I don't think it was a blinded trial).
The most important role of fiber, in my current opinion, is to provide food for intestinal flora. The flora produce fatty acids like butyrate and propionate, as well as aiding in mineral absorption and maintaining a healthy gut flora composition.
The reason I singled out greens is they're also nutrient-dense. They contain a lot of vitamin K, some of which may be turned into the important vitamin K2 MK-4 in the body. They're also full of well-absorbed minerals. But I like other vegetables (including the starch ones) and fruit as well.
Excellent.
nice blog on health problems
Stephan,
Excellent interview. As always, your answers were succinct, well-reasoned, and sure to get new readers thinking further about health and nutrition.
Monica,
I think there is so much truth in your well-phrased comments. I particularly liked your statement "research that is the most basic and least "applied" tends to be the least susceptible to manipulation and dishonesty".
Good post, Stephan, and I love the blog! What do you think of this article, published recently in the Economist? "...insulin resistance is actually a protective mechanism"??? - Luke
Great interview; I'm pointing some people to it as a jumping off point for the literature I've been reading.
Re: GMO food... I'm not against GMO food in principle, the same way I am not against communism in principle. The problem is the way it is practiced. As far as safety is concerned, GMO is probably safe. But, I agree with Stephen, my issue with GMO is the politics and economics of having sterile plants that enslave the farmer to a corporation. I think this is the rational problem with GMO, even though most of its critics play the unsupported "hidden health danger" card instead.
Good job, Stephan!
Tom,
An antioxidant that acts as a prooxidant under normal conditions is coenzyme Q10 as discussed in the following link.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17482887
Excellent Job, Stephan.
Thanks for not mentioning cavemen, bloodletting or vibram five fingers : )
"GMO is probably safe."
Generally, I think that depends on whether the problems are caught in time before the products reach market. See this article: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/334/11/688
"But, I agree with Stephen, my issue with GMO is the politics and economics of having sterile plants that enslave the farmer to a corporation."
I'm pretty sure terminator technology to produce sterile seeds is banned, though it has been developed. But consuder that if they develop such technology as a way to protect their intellectual property, they're accused of trying to enslave farmers. If they don't (and they currently don't) they're attacked when they go after farmers for violating their contracts, which include paying them a fee to replant the seeds yearly. They can't win either way.
I think there's some confusion on the issue of intellectual property rights here, and to be fair to both sides, it's a tricky issue. Just because you found a gene in another species, and transfer it to that species, doesn't mean you have the right to patent that species. How much IP is significant justification for a patent? Not one gene out of thousands, certainly. Especially if that gene hasn't been significantly altered before making the transgenic plants. Part of the problem is the patent office, which doesn't have a clear understanding of property rights. There is no such thing as a right to patent a naturally occurring entity like a gene. But it gets tricky. What about high-mass man-made elements only created in a lab? Does someone have IP rights to those if they want to pursue a patent? Tough one. Same issue with altered transgenes.
Personally, I don't think genes should be patented (and they are). But inserting foreign genes in a different species may constitute enough IP for a license.
It's very tough to know what is going on in cases where farmers are getting prosecuted. Are they being unjustly brought to court by Monsanto, Syngenta, et al. for some stray GM seed that blew into their fields? Or did these farmers deliberately test the plants for herbicide resistance, test them, and then collect the seed? (This is what Monsanto alleges happened in the Schmeiser case in Canada.)
The former doesn't represent a violation of the company's IP rights, but the latter does.
I don't think Monsanto has a very clear understanding of individual rights. That's because they pursued labeling bans on rBGH-free milk and sued its competitors in state after state. They are very pro-FDA coercive regulations in terms of food labeling.
But regarding IP of GMOs. This is a tough one, because many farmers are not allowed to discuss the particulars of their case once they have reached settlements, and so it is very difficult to know exactly what has gone on. It's also difficult to know what is going on in other countries. (Still, I'm skeptical of some of the sensationalistic stuff regarding GMO that I read online.)
If farmers are saving seed from year to year, that is a violation of the contract. No one is forcing them to buy or plant that herbicide-resistant seed. We can argue about whether Monsanto buying seed companies is a significant enough problem to restrict access to non-GMO seed or whether Monsanto is applying for unwarranted patents of natural varieties. I'm not knowledgeable enough in this area, but frankly, I'm skeptical. Farmers need to be informed consumers just like everyone else.
There are two possibilities here: either the farmer found an adjacent source of plants that appeared to be resistant to RoundUp and saved them (some people allege that this happened in the Schmeiser canola case in Canada), or the plants cross-pollinated. Obviously, in cases of cross-pollination of a farmer's crop, the case is not so clear-cut. A farmer should not reasonably have to construct barriers to keep his seed free of RoundUp-ready transgenes from adjacent farmers. Nor should he have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines or seed replacement because that happened. It's Monsanto's job or their clients' job to keep those varieties contained.
This is a very similar problem to pesticide drift and organic farming. In many cases (such as use of pesticides in beekeeping areas, etc.) I think it would ultimately boil down to who was there first.
And now for something really horrifying, speaking of malnutrition in the developing countries, read this: "Migration, on Ice
How globalization kills chickens for their parts": http://www.meatpaper.com/articles/2008/0620_wollan.html (as seen at http://ladebrouillard.com/?p=202).
As if poor people in the developing world don't have enough problems with garden variety infectious diseases that we've mostly eliminated in the "rich countries," apparently they will also now get to enjoy the full complement of "diseases of modernity", the whole "metabolic syndrome", courtesy of Tyson Foods, et al!
Stephan, et al.
Thanks so much to everyone posting on this blog for your diverse and truthful insight.
Stephan, a special thanks to you for your work fostering a community that brings this insight together.
Monica: Ideally, genes would not be patentable. The USPTO does not allow algorithms to be patented, as it considers them to be "discovered" rather than invented. However, I understand that an invented combination, or process for making combinations or finding combinations, may be patentable.
And yes, I said "probably" as a purposeful hedge, barring discovery of some unknown danger. But this realm isn't unique to GMO; we boiled sassafrass root for teas and soft drinks until we discovered naturally occurring toxins in the plant.
a study that is pro-antioxidant supplementation:
"The results indicated that dietary intake of vitamins A, C, and E may influence blood levels of catalase possibly through their antioxidant effects on free radicals. The data underscore the importance of concurrent quantitative assessment of nutritional intake when measuring endogenous antioxidant activities and support a role for antioxidant supplementation in the treatment of dementia disorders."
Here is the web address for that pro-antioxidant study:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=273698
I posted your comment about antioxidants at art de vany's site. he says he has a ton of studies showing the benefits of antioxidant supplementation. i'll ask him for some and send them your way. is there a specific antioxidant you want to look at?
Hi Mary,
All that study showed is that Alzheimer's patients have less circulating antioxidants than non-demented people. It doesn't show that antioxidants reduce the risk of Alzheimer's.
Antioxidants seem to make metabolically dysfunctional rodents on poor quality diets healthier. The data in humans just haven't panned out and rest on a lot of shaky assumptions.
As another example, supplementing vitamins E and C prevents the metabolic benefits of exercise, because ROS are part of the pathway that mediates those benefits:
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/21/8665.abstract
It's possible that some antioxidants will be shown to be beneficial in humans at some point, but the long-term studies proving safety and efficacy don't exist at this point.
I recent review of anti-oxidants:
Antioxidants: Molecules, medicines, and myths
hmm...that should have been "A recent...."
Here is another article that questions the benefits of antioxidants outside their natural setting.
http://www.dcscience.net/The%20antioxidant%20myth.pdf
The antioxidant myth: a medical fairy tale
05 August 2006
NewScientist.com news service
And it seems much is as yet to be determined.
Here Vit E reduced inflammatory markers in CHD patients
http://www.jacn.org/cgi/content/full/25/5/420
I agree that the best source is diet, but were are degrading and diluting the nutrient density of our food sources; intelligent use of minerals and other supplements may be a pragmatic next best option.
Ooops
Were should have been we (-:
Sorry !
I'm late to the party, but the particular phrasing here caught my attention: "Throw out anything made with white flour, sugar and vegetable oils." Stephan, you're implying that we could or should eat whole grain wheat flour. I'm a little confused, I thought your position was against wheat?
I know you go on to say "Many people find that eliminating wheat aids weight loss and general health" but this seems to be a milder position on grains than I would have thought you would have taken (apologies for the tortured grammar).
Stephan, do you have elevator speech on wheat, that might help me understand your position?
Hi Ed,
I think wheat is problematic for many if not most people due to the gluten content. But white flour is the worst because it's also low in micronutrients.
I don't really recommend wheat at all, but I'm not going to get worked up about someone eating artisanal sourdough.
I take a flexible position because I'm not a drill sergeant and I understand that people have cultural traditions and social lives. But I think wheat in general is a poor choice for a staple carbohydrate, and especially modern high-gluten chemically treated white flour.
Excellent interview! Bookmarked so I can quote it elsewhere.
Norman Borlaug may well have "saved" billions of lives - but for what? So they can generate even more billions of lives to be stuffed with wheat? I have my suspicions that the increased toxicity of many modern crops is due to breeding for pest resistance, and the decreased micronutrient content from breeding for yield.
My suspicion is that WHO, USDA, etc. etc. are now engaged in a breeding programme to eliminate carbohydrate intolerance from the population so those remaining will be able to survive on high grain diets (for rather low values of "survive")
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