Another stupid theory: Brush your teeth to avoid heart attacks

This is all based on one-factor modelling. We await a double blind study. In the way of these things we will one day no doubt be told that teeth brushing is BAD for you

HERE's another reason to brush your teeth: poor dental hygiene boosts the risk of heart attacks and strokes, a pair of studies reported this week. Heart disease is the No.1 killer worldwide, claiming upward of 17 million lives every year, according to the World Health Organisation. Smoking, obesity and high cholesterol are the most common culprits, but the new research shows that neglected gums can be added to the list.

"We now recognise that bacterial infections are an independent risk factor for heart diseases,'' said Howard Jenkins of the University of Bristol in Britain, at a meeting of the Society for General Microbiology in Dublin. "In other words, it doesn't matter how fit, slim or healthy you are, you're adding to your chances of getting heart disease by having bad teeth,'' the professor said.

There are up to 700 different bacteria in the human mouth, and failing to scrub one's pearly whites helps those germs to flourish. Most are benign, and some are essential to good health. But a few can trigger a biological cascade leading to diseases of the arteries linked to heart attacks and stroke, according to the new research. "The mouth is probably the dirtiest place in the human body,'' Steve Kerrigan of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin said. "If you have an open blood vessel from bleeding gums, bacteria will gain entry to your bloodstream.'' Once inside the blood, certain bacteria stick onto cells called platelets, causing them to clot inside the vessel and thus decreasing blood flow to the heart.

"We mimicked the pressure inside the blood vessels and in the heart, and demonstrated that bacteria use different mechanisms to cause platelets to clump together, allowing them to completely encase the bacteria,'' he said. This not only created conditions that can provoke heart attacks and strokes, it also shielded the bacteria from both, immune system cells and antibiotics. "These findings suggest why antibiotics do not always work in the treatment of infectious heart disease,'' Prof Jenkins said.

In separate research, a team led by Greg Seymour of the University of Otago Dunedin in New Zealand showed how other bacteria from the mouth can provoke atherosclerosis, a disease that causes hardening of the arteries. All organisms - including humans and bacteria - produce "stress proteins", molecules produced by conditions such as inflammation, toxins, starvation, or oxygen deprivation. One function of stress proteins is to guide other proteins across cell membranes. But they can also can latch onto foreign objects, called antigens, and deliver then to immune cells, provoking an immune reactions in the body.

Normally, the body does not attack its own stress proteins. But bacterial stress proteins - which are similar - do trigger a response, and once that has happened the immune system can no longer differentiate between the two, said Dr Seymour. "White blood cells can build up in the tissue of arteries, causing atherosclerosis,'' he said.

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Save the planet by cutting down on meat? That's just a load of bull

By the inimitable Boris Johnson. Never before has London had such a jolly and irreverent Mayor. The man is a living national treasure



Look, I hate to be rude to the UN. I don't want to seem churlish in the face of advice from a body as august and well-meaning as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But if they seriously believe that I am going to give up eating meat - in the hope of reducing the temperature of the planet - then they must be totally barmy.

No, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, distinguished chairman of the panel, I am not going to have one meat-free day per week. No, I am not going to become a gradual vegetarian. In fact, the whole proposition is so irritating that I am almost minded to eat more meat in response.

Every weekend, rain or shine, I suggest that we flaunt our defiance of UN dietary recommendations with a series of vast Homeric barbecues. We are going to have carnivorous festivals of chops and sausages and burgers and chitterlings and chine and offal, and the fat will run down our chins, and the dripping will blaze on the charcoal, and the smoky vapours will rise to the heavens. We will call these meat feasts Pachauri days, in satirical homage to the tofu-chomping UN man who told the human race to go veggie.

And the reason I respond so intemperately to his suggestion is that he completely misses the point. Everybody knows the reality, and everybody - every environmentalist, every Guardian columnist - pussyfoots around it. The problem is not the cows; the problem is the people eating the cows. The problem is us. Oh, Dr Pachauri is quite right to be concerned at the emissions of noxious vapours from farm animals. As the UN revealed in 2006, livestock make a bigger contribution to the greenhouse effect - to global warming - than every motor vehicle on the planet.

Cows are spreading remorselessly over the earth, as jungle is turned into pasture, and pasture is turned into cud, and cud is turned into the terrible ruminant efflatus that rises from the fields and the farms and swaddles the globe in a tea cosy of methane, 23 times as damaging as CO2.

Livestock now use 30 per cent of the earth's surface, and farming now produces 37 per cent of the methane created by human activity, and every extra cow means thousands of extra cowpats, each cowpat seemingly innocent enough, but together capable of emitting enough steaming gas to change the composition of the upper air.

Yes, Dr Pachauri is spot on in his analysis. It is his prescription that is absurd. He is quite right that if you want to buy a gas-guzzler 4x4 Range Rover and you want to offset your greenhouse emissions, you just have to pop into the nearest field and assassinate a cow. And he is quite right that if we were to kill all the cows in the world, and all the sheep, we would greatly reduce our methane output.

What he neglects in his argument are the 1.3 billion people whose livelihoods depend on agriculture, and above all he forgets the global population of human beings. It is our appetite for meat that supports those farmers, and it is our insatiable desire for burgers that has called those poor cows into existence.

Why, oh why will the modern UN say nothing about the real issue, the prior issue, the unspeakable truth that is at the heart of deforestation, global warming, the depletion of the seas, the destruction of species and just about every environmental problem that afflicts us? The biggest threat to the planet is not the lowing of the cows as they take over the Latin American savannah. It is the dizzying increase in the numbers of people driving those cows and then eating them. The world's population is up to 6.72 billion, and set to rise to 9 billion by 2050.

Now let me tell you something about the year 2050. It is not that far off. I fully intend to see it in, since I will be a mere 84, and I must say that I do not look with enthusiasm at the prospect of sharing the planet with another 2.3 billion people. I am sure that they will all each be individually charming and they will all have much to contribute to the intellectual and spiritual life of our species. But they will also make life that much more crowded, sweaty and exhausting than it already is. They will accelerate the urbanisation of the world and the turning of rural south-east England into a gigantic suburbia.

And whatever Dr Pachauri may say, I do not think they will be persuaded to eat nut cutlets. Millions of years of evolution are not to be reversed by a spot of preaching from the UN. Man is an omnivore, culturally and probably biologically programmed to take protein from meat; and those meat animals must be farmed. We cannot all eat moose, like Sarah Palin. We need cows. Not so long ago I stood in the vast canteen in the Beijing Olympic village and on one side were long salad bars, with virtually no one in the queue.

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