ecomii natural health blog » Matt Brignall

The Hottest Fashion Accessory of This Year’s World Series: the Magic Necklace

Matt Brignall — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 13:20:33 +0000

I’m a big baseball fan. Even though none of my teams are in the World Series this year, I’ve been tuned in as much as my busy work schedule has allowed. It’s hard not to notice that pretty much all the pitchers this year (and more than a few of the hitters) are wearing flashy cord-like necklaces.

Now, not being much of a fashion devotee, I just figured it was another trendy flourish. With the number of players sporting tatoos, piercings, and weird facial hair, the necklaces seemed like just another goofy thing. Until I came across this.

It turns out that the necklaces are being used as a performance-enhancing tool, and that the titanium ions are believed by some to aid recovery and prevent injury. This is almost certainly a fanciful claim.

A rule I like to live by as I evaluate non-conventional medical claims is that if the claim being made requires you to believe in a biological process nobody ever found before, that claim is probably untrue. In this case, the manufacturers are claiming that there is an energy flow that relaxes muscles and creates some mythical equilibrium that can somehow be manipulated with titanium molecules. In fact, muscle physiology is very well understood, and is controlled by a delicate balance of inflammation, a bunch of mineral nutrients, and other small molecule mediators. Based on our scientific knowledge today, titanium really doesn’t have anything to do with it.

Of course, people selling these necklaces claim that titanium is extensively researched for its health benefits. But what they don’t tell you is that none of these studies are designed to look at wearing a titanium necklace (or eyeglass frames) to help with athletic performance. Instead, the cited research is looking at things like titanium hip replacements and dental implants.

Don’t kid yourself, the company that sells these things knows that they are on thin ice here. This is why you’ll not find any health claims on their US website, only on their overseas versions or through third party distributors. They probably are well aware of the multimillion dollar lawsuit against a similar company about five years ago.

If you are on a $12M per year contract, wasting $40 on a placebo necklace is probably not all that big a deal. The rest of us who get weekly paychecks smaller than a Lotto payout might want to think twice about it. And Major League Baseball really shouldn’t be licensing their logos to this kind of hokum.

Oh – and finally, a note to Phiten: if you are going to claim that your product is able to prevent injury, it’s a really poor marketing strategy to feature a guy who just had a potentially career ending surgery in your sales video.

Misinterpreting Research to Reassure the Public – an Object Lesson

Matt Brignall — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 17:34:57 +0000

A new study published in the journal Toxicological Sciences looked at the concentrations of a toxin called bisphenol A (BPA) in the blood and urine after a single-day moderate dietary exposure. The authors found that people eating three meals per day from cans lined with BPA had large spikes in their urinary output of the chemical, but that very little BPA was found in the blood stream.

An industry group quickly released a statement suggesting that this article was definitive evidence of the safety of BPA exposure from cans. It is in fact no such thing.

First of all, the study provides definitive proof that BPA from cans leads to spikes in urinary output, a finding that would be impossible if it were not absorbed. Second, this study included no measures of safety, only measuring some of the ways BPA travels through the body (a study called pharmacokinetics).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the blood stream is not the only place BPA ends up. In particular, it seems to have an affinity for fat storage areas. Unless the researchers measured intake versus urinary output (or better yet, did some radiolabeling), this research model does not prove that BPA doesn’t store in the body.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has been keeping track of some of the concerns related to BPA exposure. In particular, esotrogen-like effects in children appear to be of concern with exposure to this agent and related compounds. The EPA has not yet established a safe upper intake for BPA exposure since these estrogenic effects were first noted.

For the sake of perspective, BPA is probably not one of the biggest environmental health risks we face. The EPA CERCLA list, for example, does not rate BPA among its top 200 priority items (although other estrogen-mimicing chemicals are prominently featured).

I have been very disappointed to see a recent backlash movement against environmental science, with many claiming it to be the equal and opposite force to climate science or evolution denial (here’s a particularly egregious example).

In a sense, I agree that some of the stuff I read about BPA is a bit overblown or one-sided. But we need to continue to do good science to ensure the safety of the chemicals that go in our bodies every day. Single studies don’t prove safety, and sometimes it really does take a long time to observe the truth about adverse health effects.

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Is There a Downside to the Organic and Local Food Movements?

Matt Brignall — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 22:23:22 +0000

A provocative new article in the magazine Foreign Policy suggests that the local foods and organic movements are hurting the world’s poorest populations through their misplaced fetishes (his word, not mine).

The argument behind the controversial thesis is multifaceted, and lumps together discussions that probably have no business in the same conversation - transportation costs, GMOs, and seasonal eating are all important discussions, and deserve a longer discussion than a paragraph each before being cursorily swept aside. So, I guess as a nutrition educator, I’m not a huge fan of the article. But there were a couple of things about it that really caught my eye.

First, I think this is another sign of a growing backlash against the natural foods movement. I’ve seen this coming for a while, but it’s really gathered steam over the past year or two. At first, this felt like a sort of natural response to the evangelical excesses of portions of the health food community.

As the backlash grows, however, I am starting to see some real questions about whether commercial organic foods are any better than their conventionally grown counterparts. In a world where you can buy certified organic fruit leather (in a single serving plastic package), I think this conversation matters.

Second, and more importantly, this article chooses a couple telling examples of foods that are cheaper when produced far away from where they are consumed. The first is dairy, and the other is lamb. From there, the author goes on to state that it is cheaper to eat foods from a place where production is most efficient. The circuity of this argument almost completely obscures that this assertion is exactly what was behind the local foods and organics movements in the first place – if you eat stuff that is well suited to your locality, it will be easier, more efficient, and less expensive to produce.

But, of course, the examples that the author chooses are chosen on purpose to prove a point. It is hard to miss that they are both animal foods, and therefore create higher demand per calorie than many plant foods. In fact, if this author were truly concerned about ways to help the world’s poorest populations, he would probably be better served to talk about ways to maximize plant food calories rather than how to most cheaply deliver dairy and lamb to England.

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America’s Potassium Problem

Matt Brignall — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 20:45:25 +0000

America’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) is truly a masterpiece of nutritional science.

Once a decade, NHANES publishes a comprehensive guide to what Americans eat, broken down by age, gender, race, and geographical location. This data helps guide public policy and research agendas over the upcoming decade.

The newest NHANES data, gathered from 2003 to 2006, are just starting to seep out into the research world, and if you are an advocate for food-as-medicine, the results aren’t pretty.

More than half of the population fail to get an adequate amount of a number of nutrients from their food each day, including such important items as calcium, vitamin D, magnesium, vitamin E, and folic acid. Food fortification programs help improve this situation, but only to a small degree.

The worst nutrient, however, looks to be potassium. Nearly 98% of Americans fail to receive an adequate intake of dietary potassium each day. The average American eats just over half of the recommended 4700 mg of this important mineral.

This is important for a number of reasons. First, potassium helps to balance out salt intake, and limits the bad effect of sodium on blood pressure. This effect can be quite large, to the extent that high potassium diets can mimic the blood pressure lowering effect of first-line medications.

Given that 2/3 of people over age 65 have high blood pressure, increasing dietary potassium in the population could help dramatically lower the risk of heart attack and stroke.

The other major problem related to low potassium diets is an increased risk of kidney stones. It is probably not a surprise, then, to see that the incidence of kidney stones has been on the rise over the past 30 years.

Part of the problem might be that we are comparing intake across an unreasonably high adequate intake standard. The standard is set at a level that was necessary to show reduction in blood pressure and kidney stone risk, and assumes a high level of sodium intake. It might be that people with normal blood pressure and no history of kidney stones can do pretty well at lower potassium levels.

Still, the evidence that diets high in potassium are associated with reduced mortality should make us be a little more careful about getting more of this nutrient on a daily basis. For the most part, eating more plant-based foods will increase your potassium intake, but some plant foods are much richer than others. Supplements of potassium are hard on the gastrointestinal tract, and are generally not recommended unless your blood potassium level has fallen low.

If 98% of Americans smoked cigarettes, including children, you can bet that there would be a major effort underway to reduce that number. Yet when this percentage of Americans has a dietary pattern associated with many of the same health risks, there’s barely a peep to be heard, even in the medical textbooks. It’s about time for America to admit she has a potassium problem.

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Poor Food Safety Practices: Do They Put School Children At Risk?

Matt Brignall — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 23:49:59 +0000

Do you think you are making a healthy choice by preparing your child’s lunch ahead of time, and sending it with them to school? Think again, according to a study published this week in the journal Pediatrics.

It turns out that over 90% of the lunches tested reached temperatures that would potentially foster the growth of bacteria responsible for food-borne illness. And since the temperatures were measured an hour and a half before lunch, foods were potentially sitting at these temperatures for a long time.

Do you think that cold pack you included in the lunch will prevent this issue? Wrong again. The insulated container? Nope. Neither of these were enough to prevent unsafe temperatures. Even foods that were refrigerated often spent long stretches of time at room temperature prior to being put away appropriately.

What this study doesn’t tell us is how many of these room temperature foods are causing kids to get sick. Probably, that number is quite small compared to the number of people put at risk by poor safety standards. This probably would come as small consolation, though, if your child were one of the unlucky ones.

The way we feed children in our schools has been a national embarrassment for some time. Still, it is kind of depressing news to see that by trying to improve a bad situation, parents may be trading one set of problems for another. Would it be that much to ask for schools to provide easy access to refrigerators to keep those bagged lunches healthy?

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If They Won’t Believe the Scientists, Maybe They’ll Believe the Actresses

Matt Brignall — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 23:54:19 +0000

Actress Amanda Peet is in the news this week promoting the Every Child By Two vaccination campaign. In this news article, she talks about a scary experience she had last year when her daughter contracted pertussis (whooping cough), a serious disease that has been making a comeback as vaccination rates drop.

This is not the first time Ms. Peet has been in the news for her pro-vaccine statements. In 2008, she stirred up a hornets nest of anti-vaccine sentiment when she referred to parents who don’t vaccinate their children as “parasites.” Ironic, then, that two years later her daughter (who was too young to have completed the vaccine schedule) contracted the condition that is the center of the firestorm.

My intention here is not to rehash the evidence in favor of vaccinations. It has been done more thoroughly and snarkily than I could manage to do it on such a tight deadline. Rather, my concern is about what has happened to our trust for science in this country.

When I was growing up, scientists were among the most trusted and admired professionals in our society. Vaccine scientists like Salk and Sabin were a big part of the public face of the profession, and parents lined their children up for the newest vaccines against the deadliest pediatric conditions. 40 years later, we have come to a place where we need the star of Body Shots to do PR for the vaccine industry.

This loss of trust is important, because really the only way to present vaccines as controversial is through a line of reasoning that paints science as flawed or falsified. There quite literally is no vaccine controversy anywhere in the field. I can’t find any evidence for a legitimate public health or medical school that teaches an anti-vaccine message. I similarly can’t find any support in the mainstream medical literature for the concept of too many, too soon, a central complaint of many anti-vaccine groups.

As a primary care doctor and as the parent of a child with neurological disease, I am personally very worried about the slipping of coverage rates, especially in my part of the country. Just as importantly, I am worried about our loss of faith in the scientific method, and am struggling to understand where this is coming from.

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Saltwater Chicken?

Matt Brignall — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 19:23:31 +0000

Did you know that store-bought chicken breasts are likely to have been injected with salt-water solution to increase their weight? If not, the food industry has done their job of keeping this practice under the radar. Fortunately, that is about to change.

According to a new rule proposed by the USDA, meats injected with sodium solutions will have to be labeled as such. This rule change will affect an estimated 30% of chicken sales, and up to 90% of pork tenderloin.

There are two reasons why I am excited about this change. First, and most obvious, paying extra money for water is a complete rip-off. This sleazy practice is allowing manufacturers to take advantage of consumers all across the country.

The other reason why this is important is because extra salt equals extra blood pressure, which in turn equals extra heart disease risk. Treated chicken products can have close to a gram of extra sodium per large adult serving size. Given that sodium daily recommended intakes are only at a gram and a half, that’s a significant stealth dose.

Hats off to the USDA for a nice common sense rule that should help improve our health and our finances (unless you are an agribusiness).

A New Life For an Old Idea

Matt Brignall — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 21:02:47 +0000

In the same way that a broken watch is right twice a day, every once in a while the nutrition beliefs of the natural health community and the academic community line up in unexpected ways. This is the case with the reanimated recommendation of Meatless Monday.

The concept of a Meatless Monday as a means of conserving scarce resources is nearly 100 years old. It was developed in response to food shortages during World War I, and was revived during World War II. But once peacetime rolled around, the programs were placed in the same mothballs as the Send Over Smokes program and the Liberty Bond.

In 2003, as part of the Healthy Monday series of campaigns, the guy responsible for the advertising catch-phrase “don’t squeeze the Charmin” revived the Meatless Monday program. The Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health quickly signed on. Now, the program has a flashy website and a shout-out from the New York Times.

What I find so interesting about this everything-old-becomes-new-again revival is that the reason behind the program is 180 degrees away from the original. While the wartime vegetarian days were a response to shortage, the new version is a response to excess. In fact, the promotors of the modern MM program suggest a number of potential health benefits from eating less meat. While I think they’ve cited data a little selectively to prove a point, I do agree that eating a more plant-based diet may improve health outcomes in some important areas.

In addition to individual health benefits, the Meatless program is suggesting that could improve the health of the planet. In particular, livestock raising produces more greenhouse gasses than transportation – 18% more according to a recent UN report. And because livestock grazing uses such a large percentage of the world’s arable land, meat eating by the rich could potentially drive land shortage to feed the poor. Meat industry lobbyists have predictably challenged these assertions.

Economic concerns notwithstanding, I am a proponent of the Meatless Mondays initiative. I think it is a great way to encourage people to explore plant-based foods, and if practiced widely, could have tangible positive environmental consequences. But then, I’ve been celebrating Meatless Sundays through Saturdays for about 16 years.

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Can You Reverse Type 2 Diabetes?

Matt Brignall — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:05:45 +0000

People with type 2 diabetes can not only normalize their blood sugar, but can undo some of the tissue damage that leads to the disease, according to a provocative new study published this month in Diabetologia.

Previous research trials have demonstrated that you can go into remission from type 2 diabetes, but conventional wisdom has been that the hormonal changes leading to diabetes are progressive, and only go in a single direction – getting worse.

In this study, a group of 11 recently diagnosed (< 4 years ago) type 2 diabetics under the age of 65 ate a 600 calorie diet for 8 weeks. This diet was largely made up from a liquid nutrition product called Optifast, but also included 3 servings of vegetables per day.

On this very restricted diet, blood sugars returned to the upper end of normal ranges very quickly and remained there throughout the diet intervention. Hemoglobin A1c, the benchmark for measuring diabetes control in primary care clinical practice, also came down to a non-diabetes range. But that’s not what makes this study newsworthy.

What got my attention was that measures of insulin resistance and pancreatic production of insulin -the two problems that co-exist in type 2 diabetes patients - both improved during the study. I have seen studies demonstrating the first improvement, but as far as I had been aware, pancreatic function has not been shown to significantly improve with a diet change alone.

Previously, loss of insulin production by the beta-cells of the pancreas has been considered to be progressive and irreversible. Even the term we use to describe this phenomenon, beta-cell burnout, seems to highlight this belief. If other research groups can confirm this finding, it truly will represent a paradigm shift in our understanding of diabetes management.

This study reminds me of the research published by Dean Ornish in the early 1990s – research that helped drive my interest in natural health as a career. Prior to Dr. Ornish’s study, atherosclerosis and heart disease were similarly seen as a one-way street. You might at best slow down progression, but once started, there was no way back. Since 1990, we’ve seen other diet and pharmaceutical interventions similarly reverse atherosclerosis to one degree or other, but until it was demonstrated once, noone even knew we should try.

All that said, we should probably not get too excited about this first study. It’s a small group, it’s all people with early onset diabetes (so not that much pancreas damage), the diet is so restrictive as to not be sustainable, etc. Still, if it is possible that the pancreatic changes that occur with diabetes can be reversed, maybe the next step is to see what happens with a more balanced and holistic approach.

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USDA Rearranges the American Plate

Matt Brignall — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 22:32:02 +0000

Last week, the United States Department of Agriculture replaced the long-standing food pyramid icon with a new visual image based around a standard meal plate. This new graphic is the centerpiece of a dramatically reworked set of dietary recommendations that began to emerge this past February.

To understand why this is such an upgrade, let’s start with a bit of history. The original Food Pyramid was released in 1992.While it was an easily understood image, it was hardly a document geared toward controlling a trend toward obesity. It heavily emphasized grains, and provided little help with choosing grain-based foods wisely. It also emphasized meat and dairy in a way that seems in retrospect to be overly food industry-friendly and calorie-dense.

In part due to these criticisms, the USDA released the revised MyPyramid program in 2005. Unfortunately, this revision replaced the controversial areas with ambiguity, and left nutrition instructors with a concept so ponderous and difficult to understand that it never gained any traction in the community. And it was heavily and consistently slammed by educators almost from the moment of release.

I’m not surprised to see that the USDA has chosen a plate concept as a graphical theme. I’ve been using this type of guidance clinically for years, and am aware of several other mainstream and advocacy groups that have used this hook in the past.

By rearranging the food groups into a plate graphic, the new version restores the concept of proportion in the best manner yet. What might be easier to miss, though, is that the new version also radically changes these proportions from previous versions – where the 1992 version suggested up to three servings of grains / meat / dairy for every fruit or vegetable, the new version brings it to closer to one-to-one. I predict the food industry may not like this.

The bigger victory for the USDA over the food industry, though, is the complete disappearance of added fats and sweets. These were the peak of the original food pyramid (“use sparingly”), and were a small part of the revised version. This subtle, but profound, change is consistent with the USDA message about SOlid Fats and Added Sugars (SOFAS). It’s perhaps my favorite part of the new guideline.

Looking under the hood a bit, I’m also very pleased with the simple and clear action steps provided on the MyPlate web site. The pages are easy to navigate, and written in a way I would expect a grade school student to understand. Although terms like “whole foods,” “sustainable,” and “organic” don’t make any appearances, it looks to me that this supportive content was written by somebody coming from a whole-foods diet point of view.

The one obvious compromise solution in MyPlate is the rebranding of meat and beans to protein. I understand where they were probably coming from – the USDA was sued earlier this year by a physician group upset with the lack of vegetarian alternatives presented in the MyPyramid schema.

I think that using the term protein is going to increase ambiguity without giving any incentive toward increasing plant-based protein sources, and may even have the unfortunate effect of giving further fuel to faddish high-protein diet gurus. That said, the MyPlate website does offer some good content around vegetarian diets, even going so far as to provide some easy instructions on how to eat a balanced diet without meat.

Admittedly, the 2005 revisions to the original Food Pyramid concept set the bar for improvement awfully low. Still, this new MyPlate concept is almost everything I could have hoped for, and represents a beautiful balance between simplicity and complexity. Well done, USDA.

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