Scientists discover drops of truth in medieval belief in urine

Urine testing is not exactly new in modern medicine either -- but the idea that more information can be extracted from urine analysis does sound interesting. I doubt that it could give dietary information with a high degree of certainty, however. A background article is here

Medieval physicians believed that they could diagnose disease by holding up a flask of the patient's urine to the light and squinting at it. According to scientists at Imperial College London, they could have been on to something. A team there has completed the first worldwide study of the metabolites (breakdown products) that are found in urine, reflecting the diet, inheritance and the lifestyle of the people from whom it came. They call such studies "metabolomics" by analogy with genomics, which looks at all the genes that make up the human species, and proteomics, which does the same for proteins.

The study used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to compare racial and national groups by the composition of their urine. From Japan, Beijing, Corpus Christi, Belfast and West Bromwich, urine differs in subtle ways that could provide a powerful new way of linking diet and health. The metabolites they found come from microbes in the gut, from diet and from the metabolism of the host.

The team believes that the research may provide the basis for a "metabolome-wide association" approach to help to understand interactions between lifestyles, environment and genes and how they determine diseases. The metabolic fingerprints show that people in the US and Britain who share a tendency to high blood pressure and heart problems have similar patterns. Writing in the science journal Nature, the team identifies metabolites linked to high blood pressure, such as the amino acid alanine. Hippurate, another by-product of gut bacteria, is found in people with lower blood pressure who drink less and eat more fibre in their diet.

Scientists from Imperial College, the US, Belgium, Japan and China took samples from 4,630 volunteers aged between 40 and 59. Professor Jeremy Nicholson, from Imperial College, said: "Metabolic profiling can tell us how specific aspects of a person's diet and how much they drink are contributing to their risks for certain diseases, and these are things which we can't investigate by looking at a person's DNA. What is really important is that we can test out our new hypotheses directly, in a way that is not easy with genetic biomarkers."

Source






The war on `passive drinking'



European Union and United Nations officials are plotting to make drinking as socially unacceptable as smoking. Hectoring campaigns over "passive smoking" are credited for Europe's almost total smoking ban. Now alcohol is in the sights of the public health miserablists and they have invented the concept of "passive drinking" as their killer argument.

The Daily Mail takes up a report in New Scientist to trumpet a new "guilt campaign" that is heading our way. "The World Health Organisation's global strategy will aim to match the success of campaigns which have made smokers feel guilty about the harm second-hand smoke does to others," says the report. Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians is wheeled on to confirm the new approach. "The tipping point for banning smoking in public places was third party damage," he said.

The EU public health brigade are not far behind, in fact Brussels miserablists in the European Commission's DG SANCO have been trying to poison the drinking debate with this new assault on reason for years. I took up the EU "passive drinking" debate around two years ago in response to strident claims, in a Commission report, about the high environmental or social toll of alcohol, the "harm done by someone else's drinking".

"The total tangible cost of alcohol to EU society in 2003 was estimated to be 125bn euros (79bn-220bn), equivalent to 1.3 per cent GDP, and which is roughly the same value as that found recently for tobacco," said the report written by Dr Peter Anderson, who has a background in the World Health Organisation (WHO) and who played a leading role in Tobacco Free Initiative Europe. "The intangible costs show the value people place on pain, suffering and lost life that occurs due to the criminal, social and health harms caused by alcohol. In 2003 these were estimated to be 270bn, with other ways of valuing the same harms producing estimates between 150bn and 760bn."

On Thursday, at an informal meeting of health ministers in Brdo, Slovenian Health Minister, Zofija Mazej Kukovic dusted off the report - and its language. "Harmful and dangerous alcohol consumption causes more than seven per cent of the premature morbidity and mortality in our countries. The annual costs stemming from this have been estimated at as much as _125 billion for the EU as a whole. However, the harm caused by alcohol is still underestimated," she said.

The figures are meant to be pretty scary. Drink is responsible for 2,000 homicides, four out of 10 of Europe's annual murders. "The economic cost of alcohol-attributable crime has been estimated to be 33bn in the EU for 2003..while the intangible cost of the physical and psychological effects of crime has been valued at 9bn - 37bn," said the Anderson report.

Children, too, are passive victims of drinking. "Many of the harms caused by alcohol are borne by people other than the drinker responsible. This includes 60,000 underweight births, as well as 16 per cent of child abuse and neglect, and five to nine million children in families adversely affected by alcohol," says the EU report's summary.

The link made by between alcohol and crime today, whether violence or child abuse or other social ills, follows not from hard facts but from an outlook that sees human characteristics as damaging in general. And if human beings, particularly when under the influence of stimulants, are destructive, then, the argument goes, social intervention must follow. The idea that almost any activity - drinking, eating, speaking, even thinking - can cause harm is often blown out of proportion and used to generate frightening figures and policies.

The sheer absurdity of the idea of "passive drinking" would be funny if the public health lobby was not so powerful and unpleasant. I found that in a twist of irony, probably lost on po-faced public health types, that the expression "passive drinking" seems to have originated as a spoof in two Peter Simple columns in the Daily Telegraph in 2002 and 2003, written by the late Michael Wharton.

Mocking the rise of nonsense research to justify social measures, he wrote about research work being carried out by "Dr Ron Hardware of Nerdley University". "They were the first to discover the scourge of `passive drinking', showing by painstaking experiments and finely adjusted statistics that it was just as deadly as 'passive smoking' and equally capable of causing cancer and innumerable other ills," he wrote. It is no longer a joke or satire - do read more here on Spiked. We need to stand up to these people.

Source. Prof. Brignell also once used this idea as an absurd example.