Every cell uses the molecule ATP as a source of energy, whether it’s a bacteria or a cell in your body. Last week, scientists at Scripps Research Institute identified the way a short chemical dials up ATP production. The chemical is attached to the ribonucleic acid (that is, transfer RNA) created from the gene responsible for producing ATP in a species of common bacteria. Continue reading →

When I first started paying attention it, the emerging science of the human microbiome estimated 500 species of microorganisms live with us in our gut and on our skin. Recently I saw that the estimate is now 20 times that—10,000 species share our life.

Each of us is a member of a very intimate ecology.

That intimacy is illustrated by an article to be published in next week’s ScienceExpress. Although for some time we’ve understood a good deal about the role that our gut microbiome plays in a wide range of activities—digestion, immunity, and mood to name a few—not so much has been known about our skin microbiome.

This latest research examines how the microbial colonies that inhabit our skin help keep our innate immunity working well. Innate immunity, of course, is the general-purpose response to a potential threat—inflammation, for example, is part of our innate immune response. So it’s not just our gut microbes that play a role in fighting off assaults—our skin microbes do too.

When our gut and skin microbes are out of balance, our innate immune system is out of balance, and the incidence of inflammatory diseases such as allergies and asthma increase. In fact, these diseases have been on the rise as populations have become more urbanized. To explain the connections, some researchers propose a biodiversity hypothesis, which is a descendant of the hygiene hypothesis.

The hygiene hypothesis argues that as populations become more urbanized, they become cleaner in the sense that they are exposed to fewer microbes and so their bodies are unable to develop the antibodies necessary to contend with provocative exposures. Antibodies are the product of the adaptive immune system, adaptations that are stimulated by an innate immune response.

The biodiversity hypothesis argues that lack of exposure to a biologically diverse environment stunts the development of our microbiome. What follows is an inadequate development of our capacity to resist and recover from immune challenges.

Biodiversity is also important on the small scale of your skin and gut. Remember that there are 10,000 species of microbes living with you in a cooperative and mutually supportive process. Of those numerous species, a few dominate—the Lactobacillus and Acidophilus of fermented foods and so forth. The remaining species, in contrast, are very low density. This form of microbial ecosystem is what’s called a rare biosphere.

The term “rare biosphere” was first developed in oceanography to describe the microbial ecosystems found in marine environments. I take great comfort in knowing that that I have yet another intimate connection with the life of the seas.

But to return to biodiversity and our microbiome, there’s good reason to believe that destruction of species and the simplification of ecosystems that seem to be overtaking us, in addition to being an environmental, food, and social justice issue, is also a health issue.

So, want to improve your health? Grow a rich, resilient, diverse ecosystem.

Into this picture I want to introduce something that’s going to add to your anxiety. Researchers are fast at work in a field called synthetic life. You’re familiar, of course, with organisms that have been genetically engineered—that is, a piece of DNA, often from an entirely different species, is slipped into the genome of a cell. Synthetic organisms are built from scratch. What’s troubling is that these new creatures come literally out of nowhere—or more accurately, out of someone’s imagination.

Genetically modified organisms are enough of a worry when it comes to biodiversity, but synthetic life, if released into the environment, could be worse because it has no biological context at all. Scientists are worrying about synthetic life: they’re having conferences and establishing protocols and standards and so on.

I sure hope they don’t make a mistake.

I was watching a flock of birds the other day, swirling through the air at breakneck speed, a fluid a cries and feathers. I’m confident none of those birds flies thinking it’s a member of the flock. Each one no doubt sees things and makes decisions from its own perspective: “I’m feeling a little nervous. I think I’ll fly over there.” Meanwhile, a whole set of environmental forces are at work on the flock—forces that neither the flock nor any of its birds can influence let alone control—guiding them toward good things and away from bad things… they hope.

The people who dream up things like synthetic life are in a flock that looks at science as something that’s supposed to make the world better. They don’t seem to understand the “the world” and “better” are contested terrain.

I prefer flocks that view science as revealing what’s in the world—like how many species of microbes are hard at work protecting me from illness.

Pain is Nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong. It’s also big business: the pain management industry will rake in $60 billion this year. Pain management is also a big problem: the total economic cost of pain management is $250 billion per year in medical costs and $350 billion in lost work for a total of $600 billion. Continue reading →

You won’t be surprised to know that moving to a better neighborhood will make you happier and healthier. The latest scientific installment in this narrative was made by sociologists using data from a program created during the Clinton administration.

The program is called Moving to Opportunity and is administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. MTO as it is called is a voucher program. In the mid-1990s, 4500 people living in neighborhoods of extreme poverty in major American cities were asked to participate in the MTO program. The vast majority of these people were single-woman heads of household.

Using a lottery, some participants were given a voucher so they could move to better housing in better neighborhoods. The other participants got nothing and so were left to their own devices.

The purpose of the program was to see whether enabling people to live in a better neighborhood would improve their lives in some way. So the program periodically collects a bunch of data. The sociologists analyzed that data and published the results in Science magazine.

The press release sent out by Science was headlined “For Happiness, Environment Beats Economics.” The sociologists concluded that people who got vouchers and moved to a less poverty-stricken neighborhood were slightly happier and had slightly better mental and physical health. On the other hand, they concluded that the peoples’ “economic self-sufficiency” didn’t change—meaning, their household income didn’t improve.

Those conclusions are exaggerations not entirely supported by the data. But that’s not the important thing going on here. What’s important is the ideology embedded in the program design and the research design and how those reproduce the ideology of liberal (or what people now like to call progressive) social policy.

MTO is a charity program. The sociologists strain to make it into a success story—I’m speculating here—out of a sense of liberal guilt.

The trouble with charity is that the recipient is an object. The act of charity re-enforces a hierarchical social relationship: from those who have and give to those who need and receive.

That relationship is echoed in conventional social science in the form of transfers of income, wealth, and power from the upper classes to the lower classes. For example, the sociologists in the MTO study refer to the vouchers as “the treatment” and to families who receive vouchers as being “treated.” It sounds very clinical, doesn’t it? Just like a clinical trial where your health (and maybe even your life) is an outcome of treatments administered by experts—as in “You’re not qualified.”

I want to contrast this to a different approach in both what people do and how the science emerges from it.

In the age of Occupy Wall Street, many people are not waiting for someone in authority to commit a charitable act toward those lower down the social food chain. One group, Occupy Our Homes, works to help people afflicted with a wide variety of housing issues—most obviously with foreclosures but also with such issues as tenants’ rights.

One such is a renter’s strike in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. No vouchers here, but renters in three buildings resisting a slumlord. Organizers from the Occupy movement have joined with the strikers (Occupy Sunset Park: Rally for Rent Strikers on Thursday http://occupywallst.org/article/ocupy-sunset-park-rally-rent-strikers-thursday/).

They want a better place to live. They want respect. They’d want their rights protected. But not vouchers or other liberal social programs. They’re creating their own social program. They are the social program: which is to take power over their lives, individually and collectively. The folks in Sunset Park are about agency, not charity. And I have no doubt that they are happier and healthier because of it.

When Barack Obama ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination four years ago, a community organizer friend of mine said, “I’m voting for the organizer.” What he meant was that he expected a President Obama to encourage grassroots organizing like that in Sunset Park. There was a flurry of activity early in the Obama Administration’s first term when household meetings were held all over the US that were carryovers from the campaign, household meetings that promised community organizing.

All that faded fast. The Obama Administration didn’t want communities taking their destiny into their own hands. What it wanted was a peanut gallery. That’s because governments exist to maintain social stability, not empower citizens—particularly those in the lower classes. Charity, on the other hand, maintains social stability through dependency.

But the organizing happened despite the efforts of the pols to coopt it. And the good news is that it will make you happier and it’s good for your health. I’ve got the science to prove it.

Ten years ago, I worked with scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in writing a book about phylogenetics. Although it has “genetic” in it, phylogenetics isn’t principally about DNA. What it’s about is the relationship among organisms based on characteristics that are shared and not shared. Continue reading →

I’ve been reviewing critics of complementary and alternative medicine for a course I’m creating called “Critique of Health Practices.” It’s an odd literature. The criticisms are presented as an evaluation of alternative health practices from the perspective of the scientific method. Usually the alternative practices are found wanting. Critics typically show disdain, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly. Continue reading →

Researchers in the United Kingdom have found that a child exposed to antibiotics before the age of six months is more likely to become obese in later childhood and adulthood. More broadly, it means that the child’s energy metabolism has been harmed by antibiotics. It’s a mystery to me why this surprises anyone.

Fifty years ago, ranchers discovered that giving cattle a low dose of antibiotic increases their bulk and with it their market value. Since then we’ve also found that those antibiotics don’t stay in the animals but get spread throughout the environment, doing more than increasing the resistance of pathogens to treatment. And, of course, the antibiotics that do stay in the animal are passed on to humans such as six month old babies.

Last week, researchers at the University of Chicago answered the question, “How come?”

One would think that the metabolic disruption was the result of killing off a portion of the infant’s gut bacteria. Although true, it’s only half the picture. As you might know, your gut bacteria are in intimate communication with your immune system. A disruption in your immune system by itself can cause an imbalance in your gut microbiome and with it a disruption to your energy metabolism. It’s also true that your diet will change the ecology of your gut microbiome.

So the way this works is…

On one side, something such as a change in diet or the use of antibiotics changes your gut ecology. On another side, your immune system responds to that change. And on yet another side, your ability to absorb nutrients is affected depending on how your immune system works. The specific thing at work is an element of the innate immune system (which is the non-specific, non-antibody, first line of defense against potential threats).

The element is called lymphotoxin but was formerly called tumor necrosis factor beta, a cytokine responsible of clearing disruptive gut bacteria. If that part of the immune system isn’t working right, your energy metabolism is destabilized. And when that happens, your body doesn’t do what it’s supposed to: use the nutrients it needs and get rid of the rest.

This is a good lesson in the first law of ecology: everything is connected to everything else.

It also makes a mockery of the so-called energy balance equation used by every popular work and much of the conventional scientific work on weight gain and loss and energy metabolism generally. The energy balance equation says that calories eaten must equal calories used plus calories gained or lost in body fat.

What the University of Chicago research says is that, given one state of the immune system, calories eaten, however many, will equal calories used plus calories excreted with no weight gain. In another state of the immune system, the balance between calories used, calories gained, and calories excreted can be something else—including dramatic and unexpected weight gain.

But that wasn’t the message delivered in the press. In reporting on the research, the University of Chicago PR department and with it the media prominently promoted the idea that now vaccines and antibiotics can be developed to fine-tune the gut microbiome and immune system to treat obesity.

This is appalling.

Here’s an opportunity to re-examine a critical health issue, but instead it gets filed away with conventional technologies. In environmental economics we call such things end of the pipe technologies. The idea of using vaccines and antibiotics to cause an out-of-balance gut microbiome to re-balance itself is at the end of the pipe. Shouldn’t we instead be thinking about what we eat and what we’re exposed to that disrupts our innate immunity? That is, things at the beginning of the pipe?

Of course, it goes without saying the no one is going to think about the unintended consequences of fine-tuning our energy metabolism with vaccines and antibiotics because, as we all know, these are tried and true technologies that have been around for almost a century and nothing bad ever happens from their use. Except of course for the babies who will get fat because they were exposed to an antibiotic through, among other sources, animals that were fattened for market.

I was at dinner with friends one evening and used the phrase “the politics of science.” Another guest, trained as a physicist, didn’t know what I meant. He knew, of course, that science gets kicked around in the political process. But, in his view, the practice of science has nothing to do with politics—it’s just the facts and enlightened discourse.

The politics of health science show up in two places: in how health science reaches civilians such as you and me and in how the results of health science are produced and accepted as facts in the first place.

When I was young, eggs were recommended as a high quality food. As I grew older the cholesterol theory of heart disease took hold and as a consequence eggs were discouraged because they are high in cholesterol. Then later eggs were let off the hook when it was recognized that serum cholesterol (that is, cholesterol in the blood) is unrelated to dietary cholesterol from eggs.

The egg industry rejoiced.

Those who understood that the cholesterol theory of heart disease is nonsense ate eggs throughout. But for those who followed scientific thinking, eggs were in, then out, then in again.

Last week, the media reported Canadian researchers found that eating eggs is as dangerous as smoking. MSNBC, Fox News, and the Huffington Post among others dutifully reported the results with headlines such as “Egg Yolks As Dangerous As Smoking, Experts Say.”

So you might think this is a bit of alarmist hyperbole by the media. In fact, it’s part of the research design, a central feature that provides what the researchers call “perspective on the magnitude of the effect.”

So the journalists are innocent of misreporting the science, which is manipulative by design. However, they are guilty of failing to critically present the science in context. For example, they fail to mention the many factors left out of the analysis that might explain the greater effect of eggs on people. Nor is there a discussion of the age of the subjects for this study: all 61 and older. Nor of the study subject’s medical condition: already diagnosed as at risk of heart disease. Nor of the well-known fact that high cholesterol in the elderly reduces the risk of what’s politely referred to as “heart events.”

But even if that information was in the news reports, what most people are going to hear is that eggs are as bad as smoking and, if they’ve got any sense, they’ll stop eating eggs—which seems to be the intention of the researchers.

That’s politics: getting other people to do what you want—even if it’s not in their interest.

Yet another failure of the reporting is structural. It’s news. And, as you know, if it’s new it’s better. Yet actual science consists, not of snappy and eye-popping facts that capture our attention, but careful observation and corroboration. This was only one study. And yet everything about how this research is presented to you presses you to change what you eat.

John Ioannidis is a researcher who made fame with an article titled “Why Most Published Research Results Are False.” (Ioannidis, 2005) By implication, what journalists report about most research is equally false.

The same forces are also at work in the scientific community: the focus on the new and novel, the loyalty to institutionally sanctioned ideas, and the profound inability to critically evaluate actually existing evidence.

In an opinion piece to the New York Times, H. Gilbert Welch writes, “The truth is that for a large part of medical practice, we don’t know what works.” In answer to what needs to be done, he says, “Medical research is dominated by research on the new: new tests, new treatments, new disorders and new fads. But above all, it’s about new markets. We don’t need to find more things to spend money on; we need to figure out what’s being done now that is not working.”

As I’m sure you know, fascination with the new is not unique to health and medicine. Nor is the force of commerce, which fosters and exploits the fascination with the new, which caters to our monkey curiosity.

Welch’s recommendations include developing a healthy skepticism among physicians that would give them the skills and the courage to question the standard of care. He acknowledges that, currently, to do so is to commit “career suicide.”

If losing the fascination with the new and gaining a healthy skepticism and the courage to question the standard of care are good for medical science, shouldn’t it be good for us too? Unfortunately, because they don’t know what works, neither can we—which is far worse than career suicide since it leads to suicide by ignorance.

So tomorrow I’m having an omelette.

As I’m sure you know, statins are among the most widely prescribed drugs on the planet—exceeded in sales only by anti-depressants. Originally developed to lower cholesterol and thereby reduce the risk of heart attacks, statins have subsequently been promoted for use in a wide variety of conditions. For example, just yesterday the New York Times reported on a study that found depression was lower in people taking statins. Continue reading →

Why are people still smoking? Don’t they know it’s bad for their health? Continue reading →