A Dietary Manifesto

O.K. I'm a budding biochemist with a problem. I keep getting mad when I read otherwise reasonable people talking about healthy eating without a blooming IDEA about basic biochemistry and human physiology. We're talking science writers and physicians with best-selling books who should know better. Points to ponder (with references where available):

1. Coconut oil is NOT a health food. Just because a saturated fat comes from plants does not make it O.K. (for just a sample, see this link). I have a colleague from India who comes here periodically to do research. She is from an area of South India where most people are vegetarians, and their major dietary fat is traditionally coconut oil. THEY DIE OF HEART DISEASE AND STROKE! They fry stuff in coconut oil, just like we do with oils in the Southern US, and they die like we do. Saturated fats, from plant or animal sources, are bad for your heart, your brain, and anything else dependent for function on good blood flow as you age. My Dad, who often donates platelets for leukemia patients, could not donate one evening after stopping for a burger. The visible, yellow blobs of fat in his bloodstream clogged the machine. He felt so guilty about not being able to donate (they call him in the event of a tissue match, when someone is in real need), that he never ate that evening burger again. And making it "organic" and "grass-fed" would have made little difference. Ask a phlebotomist (a person who draws blood regularly) what happens when the blood starts to separate, and if they can tell who eats lots of fat and who does not.

2. Low fat diets are good. They are a lot like abstinence from sex outside marriage (which is also good), though; they can't work if they are not implemented. The WHI has been widely cited to "prove" that low fat diets do not work. However (see the citation for a sample), the low fat group never got their intake near the target, and the "high fat" group was at almost the same level by the end of the study. You won't see a difference if there isn't one. People say we've gotten fatter since the government started recommending fat reduction, and this is true. However, we never really implemented the fat reductions. WE JUST ATE MORE OF EVERYTHING (except fruit, vegetables, and whole grains, of course). Cookies are fat free? Eat the box! With ice cream! Aargh. Or get a fatty dessert with your Diet Cola.

3. Fiber is valuable if you want your colonoscopies to be seldom and short. If you really like long rods with clippers and cameras (I've seen them at a conference- you do NOT want to see the equipment they use) where the sun don't shine, avoid grains and beans, fruit and vegetables. They may give you gas and happy intestinal flora to help you avoid illness, after all. A lot of benefit for a little gas.

4. So what should we eat? The diet gurus of all stripes agree that we eat too much junk and too little vegetable matter. As Mr. Pollan said, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. ". If it's in a brightly colored box, don't eat it. If it has a cartoon character on it, beware. If it is in the produce section, shop ad libitum (except for the salty, white-bread croutons and nasty chemical dressings. Get a good mustard, olive oil, and vinegars and herbs and make your own dressing if you must). Stuff your fridge with vegetables, then eat them. Get a good cookbook to help you start. How? Go to your local library. Hit the vegetarian section. Look for one using real food (like vegetables, beans, rice or other whole grains, etc.). Cook a few recipes to see if you have the same tastes the authors do. Here's one I liked enough to buy. Learn the techniques, then play.

5. Want a little meat and dairy? Fine. But if you like your colon and prostate, limit them. Please. Stick to veg with a little fish or poultry once in a while. You'll resemble most of humanity throughout recorded history. Even Neanderthal skulls have been found with cooked grain in their teeth. So much for grain-free paleo dieting, eh?

End of rant. Back to normal programming. One of my fall harvests is shown above. The tomatoes out front did well this year.

"Climategate", Cash, and Scientific Integrity

It has been an interesting week in the scientific community, reading about the hacked emails from CRU, to say the least. As a Christian and a graduate student, I am interested in how the affected parties respond, and if any scientific revision will take place. The answer to the latter, at least so far, seems to be "no". I've seen interesting posts from programmers indicating that the code in the hacked documents is not good, and was designed to generate the results it did.

I've seen stories in top journals defending the investigators, for doing things that would get me hanged (or at least kicked out) as a grad student. Subverting peer review is a huge one. Sure there are some people in every field who produce suspect work sometimes, but you subject their papers to appropriate public scrutiny; you do not block their publication. Avoiding releasing raw data is another. If I told my boss I had lost YEARS of raw data in a move and tried to shrug it off, I would be toast. If I refused to show him my notebooks, or altered them before he could view them, again a very hot seat (or a cold kick out the door) would be mine. People paid with taxpayer money are employees of the taxpayer. Their data should be (and by law is) public property. Yet these guys, and the ones in the US, have avoided FOIA requests for years.

The "adjustment" of the raw data is another issue. According to surfacestations.org, most of the North American temperature stations do not meet standards in terms of siting. A lot of pavement has been laid down in the last 50 years, some of it close to these stations. My own backyard did not get hit by frost this year until November 30; the heat island effect of cities is very real. Let's face it- people would naturally put a station where they could get to it easily for maintenance, and way out in the boonies an hour from any road is not an accessible place. Next to a parking lot-much better. And if the parking lot gets paved and the numbers shoot up after 1970, so much better for you!

What about the satellite data from NASA and NOAA? Reading through layers of the atmosphere, in which the temperature rises and falls for each layer until you reach bottom, and even there the read temperature would depend on the surface over which it is read, and the time of day, etc.? It would be a lot like trying to read the back page of a newspaper section through the upper ones, if the pages were transparent, but not the ink. Tricky, and controversial. That the satellite data agrees with "adjusted" ground data does not make either one right. Precise but inaccurate leaves the hunter very hungry, even if all the arrows fall in the same place.

Modern science is funded by the acquisition of government grants from committees of scientists evaluating and rating the grants, then administrators doing their thing. For decades (at least in the biological sciences, according to multiple scientists I have met in various places), grants have had to include certain key words (cyclic AMP, siRNA, high-throughput screening, tumorigenesis, etc.) to get funding. If you d0 not have the "right" keywords, it has become increasingly difficult over the past several years to get grants, unless you are at the top of the field and are GENERATING the key words. In which case you shape the future of the field for years to come. If you are right or if you are wrong, everyone else will be too.

The scientists implicated at East Anglia were some of the top ones in their field. They and a few others at NASA and NOAA and in a center in Japan were generating the key words. It will be interesting to see how these investigations unfold (or not) and what they mean for climate science.

Magnolias are Strange Trees

We have lots of magnolias in Memphis. DO NOT plant them expecting them to be bushes. They grow up into huge trees in our mild climate. They have huge white flowers with a heavy, over-ripe fruit aroma. After the flowers, they produce these odd seed pods. And look!

 Seeds like those little square pieces of candy-coated gum! I did not try one, but it looks like some pre-historic gum dispenser. God had fun making this tree.

A Child at Play

That's how I feel sometimes in the garden. Sometimes I'm just a sweaty dirty beast, but at other times, picking tomatoes out of the crape myrtles or wondering why the slugs don't eat oregano, I'm a child wondering at God's creation again. 

A lot of people think that Darwin's theories make God irrelevant. That's like saying that your local mechanic's computer makes the car company and its engineers and factories irrelevant. Darwin's theories are not nearly as all-encompassing as some people would lead us to believe. They DO NOT explain altruism, or love, or joy, or why a lot of insects in amber (millions of years old? Tree sap?) look a lot like their many-great-grandkids. Ants are still ants, bees still bees, lizards still lizards. Waist sizes and hair configurations may change, but that certainly does not involve "evolution" in humans; why should it in insects? I'm one of those who believes more in de-evolution. Downhill, not up, from brilliantly complex to simpler, especially on the ecosystem level. The fossil record shows that in parts of the planet not inhabited by humans, God seems to play around with fantastic body forms and shapes and sizes (Burgess shales, Cambrian explosion, Chinese beds, etc.). He mercifully lets the most delicate and beautiful die before we show up to kill them. We see things with a chance to survive around our clumsy, dangerous, and fallen selves. We live in a world impoverished by our sin, yet incredibly rich nonetheless. Let's take care of it so our descendants can ask those many questions about the wonders they see.

Amending the Soil

We have a soil composed of a thin layer of topsoil over clay you could use for making pots. It is red. It holds together and can be molded when wet. It is the color of a flower pot. 

I tried growing carrots, radishes, and beets in the spring. The beets and radishes grew on top of the ground, and were small. The carrots came out deformed, even though I grew a stubby variety adapted to clay soil and dug the area extensively. 

I have finally broken down and asked my husband to acquire some sand. He brought home a few buckets-full for me, and has even offered to dig it into a bed. This entire area was once under a shallow sea, and is still well-watered, so everything under the topsoil is layered sand and clay.The layers can be many feet deep, though, so I can't just dig down to sand and mix to solve the problem. Hopefully adding sand now and organic material when I put the bed to rest in late November will help. I'm trying to save as much organic material as possible, to build soil so we can grow more stuff next year. We shall see.

How To Discern Science from Pseudoscience

What do you do when you see a new "scientific story" ? Do you believe it automatically if it suits your political viewpoint? Do you doubt everything, or are you trusting of Ph.D.s, or environmentalists, or your favorite group? How can you tell what is true?

I start in 2 places: Google Scholar for general scientific topics or Pubmed for medical topics.

Here's an example: someone mentioned the detrimental effects of ocean acidification with rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at lunch one day. Totally convinced the ocean is set to become an acid-bath dead zone. I went to Google Scholar to check the facts. From most university campuses (and probably the big-city libraries as well), you can access all the major journals. I was surprised by what I found. Several papers came out in 2003 and 2004 on the topic of ocean acidification. Most started with some variation of the following sentence from a paper in Science, one of the top scientific journals in the English language (I am quoting from memory, so this may be a slight paraphrase):

"Due to a paucity of observational data, we are basing the following calculations on computer modeling of known ocean biochemistry and projected CO2 levels." In other words, all the projections are based not on observation (which has shown ocean pH declining by 0.1 from about 8.2 to about 8.1 in the past 100 years (no citation was available, assumed to be common knowledge in the field)), but on computer models. Other papers from the same time period showed that ocean biochemistry far from human habitation is quite different from that close to land, and some admitted that, long term, more CO2 means a more alkaline ocean, not more acidic. Only in the short term would the ocean become more neutral (7 is neutral so it is alkaline right now). Yoicks! Pays to do a little scientific reading in reputable journals rather than accepting lunch-table environmentalism as fact. 

Jorge Lives- And I Passed Candidacy

Today was a big meeting for me- the Admission to Candidacy Oral Exam. It went pretty well. I blanked on a few obvious things, but that was OK, because then they didn't have to get too picky to find my limits. Otherwise God mercifully granted me coherence and intelligent words in the midst of nervousness, and it worked out fine.

Jorge is back for the second evening in a row. I am giving him food, and he lounges in the backyard. He has a scar above one eye that he did not have before, and he is thinner, but he appears to be OK, and his fur is growing back over his injuries. I like having a cat around, even if he will not talk to me. That is OK.

Gardening Means Never-Ending Learning

I told my husband at lunch that there are several grand-daddy long-legs (leiobonum vittatum) living in my green bean plants. They seem to occupy the same place every day under the leaves, so I try not to disturb them. The entomologists say they are arachnids, but not true spiders, and little is actually known about their ecology. They don't really have poisonous venom. You can read about them at 

http://www.uky.edu/Ag/CritterFiles/casefile/relatives/daddy/daddy.htm#leio. He told me that I'm really getting to know my garden and its inhabitants. That is important, as I need to know who will get to eat what, who is harmful, and who is helpful. They think the leibonum eat soft-bodied insects (aphids and grubs maybe- in which case- have at 'em, boys). I sure hope they do.

Bumblebee Fun

I like bumblebees. Evidently they are a native American pollinator (honeybees hail from Europe,as do some species of Bumblebees,though they may originally be from Asia, according to Wikipedia). Bumblebees even shake flowers in such a way as to pollinate tomatoes really well. They also pollinate squashes (hope, hope, hope) and other native American plants. As you can see from the picture, they love the borage. I think this is a Bombus bimaculatus, according to the pictures on http://www.bumblebee.org/NorthAmerica.htm .  They are fun to watch, too, as you realize that God likes to mess with our scientific minds a bit; He makes something as un-aerodynamic as possible, then makes it fly, even after it bashes its head against the wall looking for its nest several times. I like backyard science, and photographing things that don't mind the camera, and wondering at the creative power of God out there. I hope you do, too.

Leucauge venusta

This is Leucauge venusta or the orchard orbweaver. Isn't it a beautiful spider? God had fun with this one. Decorating something so gloriously that spends its life catching and eating insects, when a dull brown might have been more "adaptive", just goes to show that He is an artist as well as a superb engineer. Praise God for the small things that make our lives easier, and leave a few webs up around your place today.

Freshly Shelled Peas Bounce Higher Than Frog Eyes

Strange things run through your mind during veggie preparation when you used to be a seventh grade school teacher. Boys will try to bounce anything remotely ball-like, including the eyes of preserved frogs. Maybe they would eat more peas if they helped shell a few, and could do some comparative bounces!

Summer Has Changed Since I was Young

If you grew up on the edge of suburbia/rural America as I did, summer went by in a hot, happy blur of outdoor play, lying indoors reading, drinking tea, and leaning off the back porch eating juicy peaches and watermelon. Evidently kids don't do such things anymore. According to the National Institute for Summer Learning (warning: sales pitch for structured summer activities for kids), kids gain three times as much weight during the summer as they do during the school year, because so many sit at home alone all day eating and playing video games indoors instead of running around outside. How sad is that?

I can say as a caveat to the statistics they provide, that I grew a LOT the summer after my seventh grade year- an inch a month for three or four months. I ate massive amounts of food. My BMI probably changed pretty dramatically- though I was a severely skinny child, anyway. I could eat an entire medium pizza alone, and not look like I had eaten anything, like the skinny cows in Pharaoh's nightmare. I just got taller. I still get accused of having an eating disorder, even though I have a healthy weight. So, "kids gain a lot of weight in the summer" might just mean they are growing- or might not. It just might mean somebody needs to kick them out in  the yard, or take them to a park, or leave them with someone who can- which is where those summer programs have their place. I'm going out to run around in the yard now.

Praying Mantis

When I went out to pick fresh basil for the soup last night, I saw a most unusual praying mantis on one of the plants. I've seen a baby green one before, but this one was brown, with black-and-white-striped legs. I did not have the camera, and the lighting was a bit dim, anyway. I just looked it up on the UK entomology site, and it is a Carolina Mantid, Stagmomantis carolina. Go there for a picture of the adult. The nymph was cute. An American native! I hope it stays, thrives, and eats the bad guys.

Balance

In physiology, everything is about balance. Maintaining homeostasis is very important; despite the changes in the environment outside your body, the inside needs to be tightly regulated for you to survive. For example, you have more bacterial cells in your large intestine than there are human cells in your body. We can characterize them by type, but a lot is unknown about what is happening in there. You need some of those bacteria to help you absorb certain vitamins. Others actually communicate with your colon cells (some for good, some for ill), and we're just starting to be able to listen in on the conversation- mostly in rats and mice. We know some of the meanest bacteria out there (e. coli, c. difficile, etc.) live in almost everyone's colon without making them sick, as long as things stay in balance. Throw it off with an antibiotic for a sinus infection, and the good guys are actually more susceptible to the antibiotic than the bad guys, leaving room for the bad ones to multiply and make you ill. Viva yogurt! The kind with live and active cultures, especially the kind with multiple species listed, can help, as can other fermented food (like kefir) with live (good) bacteria. The moldy stuff at the back of the fridge will NOT help.

It's true for plants, too. Too much nitrogen, and you'll get a lot of leaves, but not much flowering and fruiting. Too much water and they rot, too little and they wilt. Oy! Learning curves are steep sometimes.

Scientists and Agriculture

These are pea plants from last year. Ignore the weeds and look at the leaves.
You'd think one of the top science journals in America would get things right, but in the past few issues it has made some references to agriculture that get on my nerves. 

1. In a recent news article about the publication of the cow genome, the author stated, "The barnyard door is now open." What's wrong with that? Most barnyards have fences with gates, not walls with doors. Barns have doors; barn-yards have gates. Small difference, but either the author grew up in a country with enough wealth to wall in its barnyards or he writes about agriculture without thinking about common farm vocabulary.

2. Same journal (remaining nameless as I may want to try to publish in it someday), issue at my house today had a computer rendition of a pea plant on the cover, looking at computer pictures of microbes. Cool picture, but the vine is almost leafless, and the leaves on it are totally wrong for the pea plants I have seen. They should be shorter and wider, not long and thin, and should be paired at the base. Neat picture in terms of artistic license, but bad in terms of scientific accuracy.

Which is the complaint I have against the modern scientific approach to agriculture. It approaches farmers with big-city contempt, and treats them like poor, ignorant peasants who just need to buy the latest scientific gizmo to be successful. It often treats the soil as a passive medium of known chemical composition (though they're just beginning to catalog the microbes in it), in which seeds tested in another climate under ideal conditions SHOULD be able to grow. Apply X herbicide, Y insecticide, Z fertilizer to this super-duper recombinant seed, and you'll get wonderful yields anywhere. Maybe.

The soil contains a whole miniature ecosystem, even in my backyard. All sorts of microbes, slugs, ants, worms, spiders, cockroaches, grubs, pill bugs, and other things I don't even know to mention cavort back there in the dirt. The soil is not a passive medium, and the farmer  (unless made so by his government) is not a helpless peasant. If scientists approached farmers as colleagues instead of consumers of designer products, maybe they'd get the vocabulary right. And they'd know what a pea plant looks like.

Side-Dressing

If I were the "perfect" "organic" farmer, I would have beautiful black loam out there with huge and healthy plants sticking insect free out of it, but I'm a science grad student, so I have clay soil with bits of wood chips and decaying leaves sticking out, and some plants thriving, with others struggling. My green bean plants have something going on that is causing some yellowing of some lower leaves, with thinning between the veins. I thought it was a fungal infection, but I see no white or black or reddish brown. It could be a micronutrient deficiency like magnesium or manganese or boron (my soil was low in boron on the tests). These minerals are important in tiny amounts for all living things, for the active centers of enzymes. When you eat plants, you get these nutrients by breaking down their enzymes and building your own for your own purposes.

I decided to side-dress the plants (put fertilizer on the ground close to them, trying not to hit the leaves, to be watered in by the next rain) to try to solve the problem with a 5-3-3 fertilizer (not terribly high in NPK) with lots of micronutrients in it. I hope it helps.

Overuse Injuries and Healing

I'm prone to overuse injuries due to my hypermobility. I injured both hands a few days ago at work, reactivating the tenosynovitis in one thumb joint and messing up the wrist of the other hand enough to cause numbness and intermittent pain. I had decided to push a few too many things through a syringe filter. Doc fixed the wrist with a "crunch" this evening, and advised ice in addition to the rest and night wrapping (in neutral position with the thumb at the side of the hand- get advice on this from a physical therapist or chiropractor or orthopedist) I was already doing. It was amazing to feel the numbness leave immediately, and all fingers (and thumb) reporting for duty without pain. If you find a good chiropractor, KEEP THE NUMBER!! I highly recommend Cole Pain Therapy Group in Memphis. They do physical therapy as well as chiropractic manipulations, they don't go neck-popping crazy on you, and they help you heal. Which, if you've had conventional doctors tell you to go away until the damage is done, then come back when they can give you drugs and surgery (a rheumatologist had the nerve to tell me that when I was a TEENAGER), is a wonderful, wonderful blessing. Hope comes in many forms, and it's a rare find when it comes with a white coat.

Back from A Camping Feasibility Study

Sorry to express it in such a geeky way, but I embraced my inner geek a long time ago. This week-end we decided to do a mini-vacation to Mansfield, Missouri, to the Baker Creek Seed Company Spring Planting Festival. It was great fun!

We left on Saturday afternoon in the rain. It had rained, sometimes heavily, for much of the night. My husband grew up with a farmer Dad, and when he was small, they went camping on rainy days. As he said "The crops were being watered and the hay was too wet to take up," so they would pack into the old Pontiac and head for the hills. Black hills, that is. They lived in Nebraska, and often the Black Hills were north of whatever system was watering the farm. He was very excited to go camping in the rain.

We did not get north of the storm. Saturday night the rain stopped, and we camped in Historic Davidsonville State Park in Black Rock, Arkansas (pop 717). We were the only tent campers. I rented the tent very reasonably from work, but it smelled like wet, dirty socks. We had fun  cooking out under a lean-to my husband rigged up with a tarp and some rope. We slept in the tent and awoke at the 5:30 AM insistence of a hoot owl. We made oatmeal on a propane camp stove. We took everything down and headed for the showers. You could not adjust the water temperature, but it was nice and warm, and the showers were very clean and new-looking. By now the temperature outside was cooling, and I put on a part-wool sweater under my rain jacket. It started raining again. We toured the abandoned site of Old Davidsonville. Even the courthouse was gone. The town had started about when my ancestors settled in middle TN, in the early 1800s. Some of their buildings and cemeteries are still around. Nothing was left but bits and pieces at Davidsonville. 

We then headed for Mansfield. On the way we stopped at the tenth largest spring in the world, to watch almost 10 million gallons of water an hour gush over a dam, and tour an old, no longer used hydroelectric facility. It continued raining.

We arrived at the festival to be directed to park in a pasture, complete with fresh cow patties. We heard 2 gardening speakers, listened to an afternoon showcase of exceptional musical talent (I didn't know kids that age could do a Bach fugue on recorders), ate marvelous food (the restaurant charged for drinks, but took donations for the food), toured the stores (seed store was tempting, but I have no more ROOM!) , and tried (at first) to avoid the increasing muck. I wished I had my muck boots. 

We checked the on-site camping- a green, grassy field, but with puddles, rain, and a biting wind. We decided to come home, and stay longer next year if the weather is better. A little more music and we headed home, after a friendly Larry and company pulled us out of the parking area with a backhoe and chain.

Camping is definitely a feasible vacation for us. It is inexpensive, and can be fun under trying conditions if you keep a good attitude. We had fun. and I feel like we were gone and resting for many days. I knew we were in the right neighborhood when we drove through a small town and there were no bars on the pawn shop windows! It was a good break.

When Maximum Photosynthesis Happens

Surprisingly enough, it is not on those cloudless, sunny days. Plants actually do best (and take up the most carbon for you carbon-o-philes out there) on bright cloudy days or hazy days, when the sunlight is diffuse instead of concentrated on just a few leaves, leaving the rest in shadow. That's one of the reasons they grow great roses in Seattle, and the rain forests are so productive. Here's a reference for this, and for the unexpected result of a volcanic eruption (more carbon uptake): Roderick M, Farquhar G, Berry S, and Noble I, On The Direct Effect of Clouds and Atmospheric Particles on the Productivity and Structure of Vegetation, Oecologia, 129(1), September 2001. There are a LOT more references than this, but the abstract of this one is pretty understandable, and viewable free at the Springerlink site. So plant out your seedlings on these bright cloudy days with confidence, knowing that their little leaves will be working hard to build new plant growth.

Hot (Pepper) Science

The April 2009 issue of Smithsonian magazine has a wonderful article about a young scientist named Joshua Tewksbury this month. He studies capsicums, the pepper plants ranging from tame bell peppers to cayennes to naga jalokias. He explores the forests of Bolivia looking for wild capsicums, to see how they evolved in hotness and how the capsaicin benefits the plants in the wild. This one is worth the price of the magazine, if you're into peppers at all. Cool stuff.