IQ: DESPERATION TO BELIEVE MYTHS LEADS TO FALLACIOUS REASONING YET AGAIN

What nonsense below! Are these guys seriously arguing that because genes with high relevance to IQ have not yet been found then there are none? I hate to repeat an old saw but the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Genes relevant to IQ are being discovered all the time. One with a big link to IQ could be just around the corner. Though it is most probable that high IQ is the result of an accumulation of many "good" genes -- which is why high IQ people tend to be healthier and live longer etc.

A team of scientists led by Professor Robert Plomin, of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, identified only six genes linked with intelligence to any degree of significance, but even those accounted for just 1 per cent of the differences in IQ between individuals. Experts said upbringing, education and a healthy diet in early life had important roles to play in helping to nurture intelligence. The research also means testing the potential intelligence of new-born babies - or improving it with genetic engineering - could be impossible.

The researchers said a study of the human genome revealed hundreds of genes which contribute to IQ, but their individual effects are barely detectable. Previous studies on twins and adopted children have established that about half of the variation in intelligence is down to environment, but almost all of the genetic component has yet to be uncovered.

Prof Plomin said: "If the biggest [genes] only account for 1 per cent of the variance [in intelligence], there's a long way to go. The most striking result is there are no large effects." However, this does not mean intelligence is not inherited. Many experts believe IQ is due to the cumulative effect of a combination of genes.

The study, published in the journal Genes, Brains and Behaviour, involved obtaining intelligence scores for 7,000 seven-year-olds and DNA samples. Dr Robin Campbell, an expert in intelligence and child development at Stirling University, said: " [This research] leaves it open that nurture, education and good early nutrition have an important role." [Of course they do. Nobody has ever said otherwise. But genetic inheritance is the major determinant]

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Success Depends on Others Failing

There may be something in the theories below but, with a only 19 units of analysis, it seems most unlikely that the findings were statistically significant. Nor can we rule out cultural and sub-cultural influences. The generalizability of these contrived experiments is also unknown but probably slight -- as I showed long ago in another field

Reward mechanisms in the brain depend on how well you think other people are doing, a new neurological study suggests. The findings, published in the Nov. 23 issue of the journal Science are the first to lend physiological proof to a longstanding theory among contemporary economists: that people are affected not only by their own achievements and income, but also by how they stack up against their neighbors.

The study, by cognition experts and economists at the University of Bonn in Germany, looks at the brain regions that process reward. Nineteen pairs of subjects performed a series of tasks, estimating the number of dots on a screen, while their brains were scanned. Each time a subject answered correctly, he or she won a cash prize but the prizes were not always the same. Players could see whether their opponents had answered correctly, and how the prize money was distributed.

The researchers were especially interested in the set of outcomes where both players answered correctly. For any given prize value, the brain's reward response was bigger if the other player earned less. Players on average were more pleased with a 60 euro prize when the other player got just 30 euros, for example, than they were if both players earned 60 euros, or if the other player got more.

"In a sense it goes back to Aristotle," says the paper's senior author, Armin Falk, an economist. "The fact that we are social beings is a well-known fact." But the idea that rewards are context-dependent challenges a key assumption behind most traditional of economic theories: the premise that humans are essentially self-interested, that they care about their own work, income, achievements, and purchases, and that whatever other people do is, if not irrelevant, at least not going to have a consistent or predictable effect on decision-making.

Instead, the brain scans from this study support a mountain of survey data collected by modern economists and psychologists that suggests people care very much about keeping up with the Joneses. In the past, researchers have often struggled to work out how much they could trust that data, not sure whether survey-takers might be changing their response consciously or unconsciously based on what they thought was socially acceptable. The Science findings give further empirical evidence that people compare their gains to others'. "If you look at the brain reaction, it's a relatively immediate physiological reaction," says Falk. "It shows on a deeper level, in the brain, these things really matter."

The practical implications? Many scholars believe that social comparison helps to explain why, even as much of the world gets ever richer, people today don't report being happier than people did 50 years ago. We might not be happy now if we had to give up the amenities of the last half-century computers, air conditioners, a bedroom for every child, and more - but back when no one else had them either, life was okay.

There's also a lesson here for company managers, says Falk. A wage scale should reflect job and performance differences fairly, or else firms risk alienating their staff. "It's extremely important for companies to understand it's not just a matter of justice, but it's also a matter of efficiency," he says. It turns out the negative response to earning less is usually stronger than the positive response to earning more or as Falk says, "The pain of having less is much stronger than the joy of having more." Workers who discover they're earning more for the same work may be happy, but those who earn less can quickly feel slighted, killing motivation and often the quality of their output. It doesn't take a brain specialist to understand how that affects a business.

Source

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Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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CONFUSED RESEARCH ON DISRUPTIVE CHILDREN

IQ ignored again! Has nobody ever told these idiots that high IQ children can be disruptive out of boredom? Failing to control for IQ in this field is brain-dead. Breaking out the data in terms of IQ might have told us something but this is just one big conflation. Disruptive kids kept up ON AVERAGE. Big deal! The average would have been made up of smarties and dummies. So what does that tell us? Nil. And the ones who did badly in later life would mostly have been the dummies

New research suggests that children entering school with behavior problems, as a rule, can keep pace with classroom learning, but persistent behavior problems can be a strong indicator of how well these students adapt to the work world.

Two studies entirely funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Developmental and Learning Sciences program uncovered these results. Researchers working through the Center for the Analyses of Pathways from Childhood to Adulthood (CAPCA) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., conducted both studies.

The findings may help parents, teachers and social and behavioral scientists improve educational and occupational outcomes for disruptive students. "Every student deserves a good education and an opportunity to have a fulfilling work life," said NSF Developmental and Learning Sciences Program Director Amy Sussman. "These findings can help us understand how to make that goal a reality for even the most difficult-to-reach students."

One study examined data from six large-scale studies of almost 36,000 preschoolers in which the same subjects were observed repeatedly over time. The research included two national studies of U.S. children, two multi-site studies of U.S. children, one study of children from Great Britain and one study of children from Canada.

Using various statistical methods to synthesize research results, Greg Duncan, human development and social policy professor at Northwestern University, along with the study's 11 co-authors, found that, surprisingly, difficulty getting along with classmates, aggressive or disruptive behaviors, and sad or withdrawn behaviors in kindergarten did not detract from academic achievement in childhood and early adolescence.

The study's researchers examined several indicators, including picking fights, interrupting the teacher and defying instructions. They found that kindergartners who did these things performed surprisingly well in reading and math when they reached the fifth grade, keeping pace with well-behaved children of the same abilities.

Although Duncan's study found no predictive power in early behavior problems for later learning, another CAPCA study, which examined older children, found such a connection. According to CAPCA investigator Rowell Huesmann, persistent behavior problems in eight-year-olds are a powerful predictor of educational attainment and of how well people will do in middle age.

If behavior problems of the kind seen in younger children continue until age eight, they can create other challenges, said Huesmann. He noted that while a small group of children fall into this category, their behavior has the potential to lead them to lower occupational and academic achievement than that of their better behaved counterparts.

Huesmann based his conclusion on a prior research study and a recent analysis by CAPCA researchers Eric Dubow, Paul Boxer, Lea Pulkkinen and Katja Kokko. That team studied two longitudinal data sets from the United States and Finland. Analysis of data from 856 U.S. children and 369 Finnish children showed that children who engaged in more frequent aggressive behaviors as eight-year-olds had significantly lower educational success by their 30s and significantly lower status occupations by their mid-40s. The results were published in Developmental Psychology. "It makes perfectly good sense that persistent behavior problems would have a substantial impact on later success," said Sussman. "When interviewing for jobs and progressing through one's career trajectory, personality and other characteristics that are not measured by tests certainly come into play."

There's a good chance that personality traits also come into play in the classroom. Huesmann and his colleagues hypothesize that children with persistent behavior problems lasting into the third grade are those who cannot be easily socialized to behave well and who therefore are more likely to experience a "hostile learning environment."

They speculate that teachers and peers likely "punish" these children, reducing or eliminating positive support for learning. But researchers note that if a child's aggression is short-lived, it is unlikely to have the same long-term consequences. "Socialization of disruptive preschoolers by teachers and peers may ensure that a child's behavioral problems do not affect his or her educational achievement," Huesmann said. "Attending class, spending time with classmates, observing the rewards of proper behavior, and being told, 'No,' to correct disruptive behavior can benefit unruly children."

Researchers also noted that popularity and positive social behavior in childhood and adolescence predicted higher levels of educational attainment in early adulthood. They said it is possible that children with stable positive social skills experience a supportive and conducive learning environment.

Duncan's study of kindergartners did not address what types of preschool curricula might be most effective in reducing aggression or promoting school readiness. But researchers pointed out that play-based activities, as opposed to "drill- and practice-based" activities, foster academic and attention skills in ways that are engaging and fun.

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Obesity, BMI and political correctness

It has been reported by the Trust for America's Health that West Virginia has the third highest level of adult obesity in the nation at 27 percent and that 65 percent of Americans are overweight. This report ended with a recommendation that more money should be spent for those who do research for nutritional health and for green projects. These claims were made using the body mass index to calculate obesity. We will see that the BMI as used today has little to do with medical science and much to do with political correctness.

The BMI was developed in 1850 by Adolphe Quetelet - a mathematician and sociologist. The BMI is a number derived by taking the weight of a person in pounds and dividing it by the square of their height in inches (weight divided by height times height). This number is then multiplied by 703. This gives the BMI value. A value lower than 18.5 is considered by some to mean that a person is underweight. Normal weight is a value between 18.5 and 25, overweight if more than 25 and obesity if more than 30. Yet, who decides that these values determine if one is underweight, overweight or obese?

The first thing that many of you have already noticed is that the BMI does not take into account sex, body frame, actual fat, muscle mass, ethnic norms or health. What is considered normal is derived by looking at the average weight and height of sedentary to average city dwellers. The problem with this approach is that this makes the socialist assumption that we are sexless, have the same body frame, same ethnicity, same muscle mass and are all sedentary. This is all done without actually measuring fat.

Men, athletes, American rural populations, blacks and those who are active all tend to have higher muscle mass and bone density than the theoretical sexless white collar urbanites have. Thus, all these groups will tend to have an overestimated amount of obesity.

The average BMI the United States used to define being overweight was more than 27.8 - significantly higher than today's 25. However, under pressure from the World Health Organization - which defined the number 25 as being the upper-limit for normal weight - it was based on their evaluation of world populations including Africa, India and other Third-World areas where there is endemic malnutrition if not outright starvation. Based on this evaluation, our government changed what it called overweight to mean a BMI value of 25. Thus, with the wave of the wand 30 million Americans were made overweight in one day.

As Americans we tend to have increased in size because of our majority European heritage, promotion of school athletics and improved health and nutrition. Is it then fair to say that we are fat and unhealthy because we are larger than our smaller counterparts' worlds without taking into consideration heritage, lifestyle, muscle mass and actual fat?

Indeed, a recent study published by Journal of the American Medical Association, using the current defined limits of what is considered normal by the BMI, actually found that those who were overweight actually had less cancer, less infections, less respiratory disease, less mental illness and arguably less neurological disease and cancer than those who were so-called of normal weight or underweight, according to today's BMI values.

The BMI tends to overestimate being overweight and obese in Americans, athletes, racial minorities, American rural populations, the working class and others. Unfortunately, it seems that the current politically correct BMI values may end up killing thousands of Americans.

Source

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Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi-tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

*********************

Cupcake saviour

Weeks have passed since Michael Benjamin's fling as a cable news sensation, but the Democratic assemblyman from the Bronx insists he hasn't figured out why people cared so much about his battle to save the cupcake.

When he first heard that several Long Island school districts were forbidding parents from bringing the frosted treats to their children's birthday parties, Mr. Benjamin never anticipated that his decision to take action would forever brand him as the nation's leading cupcake advocate.

"I was ticked that people had the temerity of banning food products," he said in a recent interview. In his opinion, the Long Island superintendents were "robbing children of pleasant childhood memories."

His solution was, of course, a legislative one. He cranked out a bill to make cupcakes the official state children's snack and thereby thwart the bans. In days, he was passionately standing up for the little cupcake before a national audience, appearing on Fox News, NBC Nightly News, and the "The Daily Show."

Source





A third of passive smokers have lung damage

These findings don't seem very robust: Small sample; doubtful diagnoses; no real baseline

One third of people who breath in high levels of secondhand smoke have damage to their lungs similar to that seen in smokers, doctors say. They used a special kind of magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scan to look at the lungs of non-smokers who had high exposure to other people's cigarette smoke and found evidence of the kind of damage that causes emphysema. "We interpreted those changes as early signs of lung damage, representing very mild forms of emphysema," said Chengbo Wang, a magnetic resonance physicist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who led the study.

"Almost one third of non-smokers who had been exposed to secondhand cigarette smoke for a long time developed these structural changes," Dr Wang said. "To our knowledge, this is the first imaging study to find lung damage in non-smokers heavily exposed to secondhand smoke. "We hope our work strengthens the efforts of legislators and policymakers to limit public exposure to secondhand smoke."

Dr Wang, who presented his team's findings to a meeting of the Radiological Society of North American in Chicago, said 35 per cent of US children lived in homes where someone smoked regularly. The team studied 60 adults between ages 41 and 79, 45 of whom had never smoked. The non-smokers were considered to have high exposure if they had lived with a smoker for at least 10 years, often during childhood. "It's long been hypothesised that prolonged exposure to secondhand smoke may cause physical damage to the lungs, but previous methods of analysing lung changes were not sensitive enough to detect it," said Dr Wang.

His team used a technique called long-time-scale, global helium-3 diffusion magnetic resonance imaging. "With this technique, we are able to assess lung structure on a microscopic level," Dr Wang said. They found 57 per cent of the smokers and 33 per cent of the non-smokers with high exposure to secondhand smoke had signs of early lung damage as measured by the scan. In February, US researchers reported that up to 20 per cent of women who developed lung cancer have never smoked.

Source





Australia: Kids must not run in park

Obesity, anyone?



A GROUP of children have been nabbed for running around a park and threatened with fines by their council. Glen Eira Council has ordered these cute "crooks" out of a Caulfield park and threatened to hit each one with a $250 fine if they return. The children and their parents are furious after they were challenged by Glen Eira officers last Thursday and ordered out of Princes Park during after-school exercise.

The council says it is trying to protect the drought-affected park by making it off limits to any organised sporting groups without a permit. However local families say the fun police are a bad joke. In recent weeks, about eight children and parents from the three families have been meeting at the park after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The energetic youngsters run a lap of the three-oval park and play games.

Dad Grant Cohen said they were approached last week by a Glen Eira local laws officer who told them organised groups weren't allowed on the grounds. "It's ridiculous -- we're just three families who all live five minutes away," Mr Cohen said. "We started coming down here because the kids would be getting home after school and playing computer games all arvo. We wanted to give them a chance to run around. "This park should be full of kids doing exactly that."

Now the kids have gone from running around to being on the run -- forced to be fitness fugitives. "We rang the council and they said that even if we went down the road to Caulfield Park, as long as we were in a group we'd still be fined," Mr Cohen said. The group were told even a single family of eight kids would not be allowed to run around together.

Glen Eira director of community relations Paul Burke said the by-law banning unauthorised groups from parks had been in place since 2000, and council had stepped up enforcement because of the drought. While Mr Burke wouldn't say the minimum number that constituted an organised group, he stuck by the decision to ban the kids.

Source

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Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi-tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

*********************

Global Warming May Trigger Rise in Heart Deaths

The fact that there are many more health problems in winter than in summer must not be mentioned of course. Both warm and cold weather can have their problems but, on balance, warm weather is better for you. People in frail health don't usually go to Iceland. They go to warmer places. But I guess we ought to feel sorry for all those elderly people who retire to Florida. The government should FORCE them to go to Alaska instead -- for their own good, of course

Soaring temperatures and high ozone levels work together to boost death risks from heart disease and stroke, researchers report. They believe that global warming -- which brings more heat and more ozone -- may further increase the number of people who die of cardiovascular events. "Temperature and ozone are strong factors in cardiovascular mortality during June to September in the Unites States," noted the study's lead author, Cizao Ren, from the Department of Epidemiology in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine. "Temperature and air pollution combine to affect the health of large populations," he added. Ren expects the problem will get worse as the earth becomes hotter. "Increases in temperature and air pollution will have a strong affect on health," he said.

His team based its findings on data on almost 100 million people living in 95 different areas across the United States from June to September. These Americans were included in the National Mortality and Air Pollution Study, which tracked links between health and air pollution for the years 1987 to 2000. Four million deaths from heart attacks or strokes occurred during the study period. Ren's team compared death rates against changes in temperature during one day.

Ozone was a common link, they found. In fact, the higher the ozone level, the greater the risk of cardiovascular death attributable to high temperatures, Ren's team concluded. Ozone levels ranged from an average of 36.74 parts per billion to 142.85 parts per billion, while daily temperatures ranged from 68 to around 107 degrees Fahrenheit. When the ozone level was at its lowest, a 10-degree increase in temperature was associated with about a 1 percent increase in deaths from heart disease and stroke. However, when the ozone level was at its highest, there was a more than an 8 percent increase in deaths from heart disease and stroke, Ren's group found.

The findings are published Nov. 21 in the online edition of the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Ozone is a pollutant strongly linked to weather conditions, particularly the amount of ultraviolet light in the atmosphere. Ozone is generated by a reaction between airborne nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and oxygen in sunlight. Exposure to high levels of ozone can affect the airways and the autonomic nervous system, making people more susceptible to the effects of temperature changes, Ren's team explained.

One expert agreed with the team's conclusions. "This paper reinforces what we know -- that both temperature and ozone affect health, even to the extent that they affect mortality," said George Thurston, an associate professor of environmental medicine at New York University. Global warming will increase both temperatures and pollution, Thurston added, because higher temperatures are conducive to the production of ozone. "This will be a growing problem," he said. For the general public, the study raises questions about pollution and climate change, Thurston said. "The health effects may be even worse than thought," he said. "There are health benefits to reducing climate change." Cutting back on the use of fossil fuels will help, Thurston said. "Reducing fossil fuel combustion will reduce climate change and pollution," he said. "We have seen the problem, and it's fossil fuel combustion. Now, all we have to do is come up with an alternative," he said.

Source




AND GRASS IS GREEN

Amazing stuff you get in the medical literature sometimes. The study below proves that more active parents tend to have more active children. Who would have thought? Is the deteriorated quality of the BMJ becoming so well known that lightweight submissions like this are needed to fill their pages?

Note also that the speculative last sentence below shows that the authors do NOT believe that personality characteristics are genetically transmitted -- despite the overwhelming evidence from the behaviour genetics literature showing that they are. The BMJ seems to have become a propaganda sheet for some weird Leftist cult rather than a worthwhile medical journal

Early life determinants of physical activity in 11 to 12 year olds: cohort study

By Calum Mattocks et al.

Objective: To examine factors in early life (up to age 5 years) that are associated with objectively measured physical activity in 11-12 year olds.

Design: Prospective cohort study.

Setting: Avon longitudinal study of parents and children, United Kingdom.

Participants: Children aged 11-12 years from the Avon longitudinal study of parents and children.

Main outcome measure: Physical activity levels in counts per minute (cpm) and minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity for seven days measured with a uniaxial actigraph accelerometer.

Results: Valid actigraph data, defined as at least three days of physical activity for at least 10 hours a day, were collected from 5451 children. Several factors were associated with physical activity at ages 11-12 years. Regression coefficients are compared with the baseline of "none" for categorical variables: maternal brisk walking during pregnancy (regression coefficient 5.0, 95% confidence interval -8.5 to 18.5; cpm for <1 h/wk and ~ 2 h/wk of physical activity 24.2, 7.8 to 40.7), parents' physical activity when the child was aged 21 months (28.5, 15.2 to 41.8 and cpm of physical activity for either parent active and both parents active 33.5, 17.8 to 49.3), and parity assessed during pregnancy (2.9, -7.6 to 13.4 and cpm of physical activity for 1 and ~ 2 parity 21.2, 7.1 to 35.3).

Conclusions: Few factors in early life predicted later physical activity in 11-12 year olds. Parents' physical activity during pregnancy and early in the child's life showed a modest association with physical activity of the child at age 11-12 years, suggesting that active parents tend to raise active children. Helping parents to increase their physical activity therefore may promote children's activity.

BMJ, 23 November 2007

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi-tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

*********************

Thanksgiving for fast food

We can thank Thanksgiving for the TV Dinner. The ‘TV Dinner’ was a brand of frozen ready meal invented in 1953 by CA Swanson, a major American food company. The story goes that they had massively overestimated how many turkeys they would need to meet Thanksgiving demand. How to get rid of the excess? The company realised that packaging the whole Thanksgiving meal on one, compartmentalised aluminium tray that you could pop in the oven, then tuck into in front of the television, might be popular with customers. They reckoned they would sell 5,000 in the first year. They sold 10 million. As one wag wrote in the Christian Science Monitor a couple of years ago: they came, they thawed, they conquered.

Then there’s the man who invented mass production of frozen food in 1923 - Clarence Birdseye. (Unfortunately, Birdseye wasn’t a ship’s captain with a gnarly voice and a crew of child pirates who ate fish fingers all the time, but an American inventor.) By being able to store food until it is required, we’ve been able to get away from the drudgery of the daily shop.

The king of fast food was Ray Kroc, who realised that the restaurant set up by the McDonald brothers in California in the Fifties would fit in with the American desire to eat out, but without the formality that Europeans were used to. He worked with, then bought out, the brothers and through a ruthless approach to sales and a thoroughly efficient operation, McDonald’s gave people quick, cheap, tasty food and revolutionised the food business.

For all the snootiness of food critics, and the panics about obesity, fast food has freed people - and that pretty much means women - from the need to spend hours in the kitchen. It means we have affordable, hot food anywhere, anytime. For every evening I’ve needed a snack while rolling home merry, for every TV show I’d have missed if I’d had to cook instead of waiting for the microwave to go ‘ping’, I’d like to salute these great American pioneers.

Source





Food fanatics now targeting hospitals

Apparently adults have to have their decisions made for them by these Fascists too

CANCER Council Victoria is heading an alliance of key health groups accusing the Brumby Government of failing to fight obesity by refusing to ban junk food in hospitals. The cancer council, Diabetes Victoria, Vic Health and Deakin University - which form Victoria's Obesity Policy Coalition - want to ban junk food in vending machines and canteens.

The New South Wales Government has done so, but a spokesman for Victorian Health Minister Daniel Andrews said canteen and vending machine food was a matter for individual health services to address.

Health groups say hospitals should be leading by example. "In hospitals we are dealing with the effects of chronic diseases, conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer which are all affected by weight," OPC senior policy adviser Ms Jane Martin said. "These conditions are a big burden on hospital budgets yet chocolate bars, sugary drinks and chips are available in vending machines 24 hours a day. "We have seen changes made in school canteens and suppliers to schools have been able to make this shift. "It is not difficult to refrigerate vending machines in order to supply healthy choices."

Hospitals were also one of the first places to go smoke-free and tackle tobacco, she said. "We need to treat being overweight like tobacco," Ms Martin said. "It's about doing the right thing for people who are sick and their families." "Patients, visitors and staff need to be surrounded by the right messages."

Department of Human Services spokesman Bram Alexander said hospital canteens did provide a range of healthy choices, but they could not make people buy them

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi-tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

*********************

THE OBESITY WARRIORS NEVER STOP TRYING

I guess it makes me weird but I do find the medical literature to be a barrel of laughs. They are so determined to come to their predetermined conclusions and the data keeps letting them down so badly! Read either the media summary below or the conclusion to the journal abstract also below and you will be left with the impression that being overweight is a bad thing. Read the bit I have highlighted in red and I think you will have a little laugh, though. Even in this highly selected group, fatties were NOT likely to die sooner. They did have more trouble with their prostate cancer but they obviously had less trouble with other things!

Excess weight a risk to surviving cancer

A new study has found that overweight or obese men are at greater risk of death following prostate cancer treatment. Published online this week in the journal Cancer, the study involved 788 men with prostate cancer who were followed for more than eight years. Compared to men with a normal body mass index (BMI, calculated as the weight in kilograms divided by the squared height in metres) of less than 25 at the time of diagnosis, men with a BMI between 25 and 30 were more than 1.5 times more likely to die from their cancer following treatment. Similarly, men with a BMI of 30 or more were 1.6 times more likely to die from the disease. Further research is needed, say the authors, to test whether losing weight after cancer diagnosis could improve survival time.

Source

Obesity and mortality in men with locally advanced prostate cancer

By Jason A. Efstathiou et al.

BACKGROUND: Greater body mass index (BMI) is associated with shorter time to prostate-specific antigen (PSA) failure following radical prostatectomy and radiation therapy (RT). Whether BMI is associated with prostate cancer-specific mortality (PCSM) was investigated in a large randomized trial of men treated with RT and androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) for locally advanced prostate cancer.

METHODS: Between 1987 and 1992, 945 eligible men with locally advanced prostate cancer were enrolled in a phase 3 trial (RTOG 85-31) and randomized to RT and immediate goserelin or RT alone followed by goserelin at recurrence. Height and weight data were available at baseline for 788 (83%) subjects. Cox regression analyses were performed to evaluate the relations between BMI and all-cause mortality, PCSM, and nonprostate cancer mortality. Covariates included age, race, treatment arm, history of prostatectomy, nodal involvement, Gleason score, clinical stage, and BMI.

RESULTS: The 5-year PCSM rate for men with BMI <25 kg/m2 was 6.5%, compared with 13.1% and 12.2% in men with BMI 25 to <30 and BMI 30, respectively (Gray's P = .005). In multivariate analyses, greater BMI was significantly associated with higher PCSM (for BMI 25 to <30, hazard ratio [HR] 1.52, 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.02-2.27, P = .04; for BMI 30, HR 1.64, 95% CI, 1.01-2.66, P = .04). BMI was not associated with nonprostate cancer or all-cause mortality.

CONCLUSIONS: Greater baseline BMI is independently associated with higher PCSM in men with locally advanced prostate cancer. Further studies are warranted to evaluate the mechanism(s) for increased cancer-specific mortality and to assess whether weight loss after prostate cancer diagnosis alters disease course. Cancer 2007. c 2007 American Cancer Society.

Source




Dads 'make young sons dumber'

The original paper is here. It is a long (155 pages), verbose and exhausting paper to read and I do not remotely have the time to read it all but two things I note is that we are primarily talking about lower class (unemployed) fathers here and that the analysis was very "lumpy". Appendix D shows that only two categories were used to examine the amount of time fathers spent with children. That very effectively obscures any possibility of discovering curvilinear relationships -- which are certainly not a possibility that can be excluded a priori in this case.

I also note that the author seems to contradict herself in the first and last paragraphs below. Amusing. Easy to see why, though. We are not allowed to come to conservative conclusions and the paper does come to the thoroughly conservative conclusion that children are best cared for by their mothers! Horrors!

YOUNG boys end up being dumber when it is the father who looks after them as toddlers, a study from Bristol University in the UK has found. A researcher from the University of Bristol in the UK has found that boys are doing worse at school when it was their fathers who spent at least 15 hours each week taking sole care of them.

According to Elizabeth Washbrook's study of more than 6000 children found that "some fathers appear not to provide the same quality of intellectual stimulation as mothers, at least to their sons". "I find robust evidence that boys - but not girls - who spend at least 15 hours a week in paternal care when they were toddlers performed worse on academic assessments when they started school," Ms Washbrook wrote in the Research in Public Policy journal. "This cannot be explained by the economic or psychological characteristics of parents in these families, nor by the characteristics of the child."

Ms Washbrook said that the findings suggest that fathers may be more inclined to believe that taking care of their son was more about "monitoring the child" than devising creative activities. She said that two possible reasons why daughters were not affected by similar time with their fathers were because dads may behave differently around them and girls may be less sensitive to a lack of creative activities - although she also said that there was no definitive proof that supported either argument.

But Ms Washbrook said that the introduction of paid paternity leave in the UK may have led to greater social abilities in children of both genders. "If paternity leave encourages fathers to undertake moderate childcare responsibilities when their children are toddlers, this may have beneficial effects on children's social development."

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi-tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

*********************

Another confirmation that middling weight is best

It's been a tough time the last little while for the fatties among us -- which is supposedly most of us. According to the just released report from the American Institute for Cancer Research being fat and eating certain foods increases our risk for cancer. The secret to a long life according to the report's authors is to be as thin as you can, while avoiding red meat, processed meats, alcohol, French fries, milk shakes and, well, you get the picture.

But in contrast to the cancer report, which received enormous and largely uncritical media attention, a new study about obesity by Katherine Flegal and colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Cancer Institute made few waves. Yet Flegal's quiet and careful study could do much to calm our growing national hysteria about obesity.

Flegal used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which is a representative sample of the US population, to find the connections between being underweight, overweight and obese and cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer and many other causes of death. The results are startling since they confound much of the received wisdom about being fat in America.

Flegal discovered that being overweight (BMI's of 25-30) was not responsible for increased mortality. In fact for CVD, cancer and all other causes, being overweight actually increased one's chance of living longer. In total, overweight was associated with a total of 138, 281 fewer deaths. Being overweight is not likely to kill you.

She found that being obese increased the risk of premature death for the most part in only the most obese, that is those with BMI's over 35. In other words, even modest obesity is not a death sentence. For example, those with BMI's of 30-35 aged 25-69 did not have a statistically significant increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. Indeed, for cancer the results are even more startling since even those with BMI's in excess of 35 did not have a statistically significant increased risk of dying. And for all other diseases other than CVD and cancer, obesity up to a BMI of 35 was modestly protective -- that is, likely to result in a longer rather than a shorter life.

She also found that being underweight carries substantial risks. Whereas obesity accounts for 95, 442 deaths, being thin is associated with 46, 398 -- almost half as many deaths as obesity. But then one is unlikely to ever hear about the risks of being thin or the mortality toll associated with underweight.

Nor are these findings a fluke. In 2005 Flegal and the same team found that being overweight reduced one's chances of dying, that the majority of deaths due to obesity were in the morbidly obese, and perhaps most surprisingly, that there was no statistically significant increased risk for death associated with even modest obesity.

The implications of these findings, which barely registered in the news cycle, are significant. They suggest that most Americans need not worry about being too fat, since most mortality is associated with BMI's in excess of 35. They suggest that the continual message from the government and the public health community to lose weight or to be as thin as possible lacks a credible scientific basis. And they suggest that it is those who weigh too little whose plight also deserves some attention.

Source




A guy who is drunk as a skunk gets aggressive and it is a a drug that he is taking (not the booze) that is to blame??

Why are tales of side-effects so often plagued by such bogus causal reasoning? You can draw NO valid causal inferences from rare episodes. Coincidence is not cause

Government scientists are investigating whether a drug from Pfizer used to help smokers quit cigarettes also increases suicidal thoughts and violent behavior. The Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday that it had received reports of mood disorders and erratic behavior among patients taking Chantix, Pfizer’s prescription drug used to help quit smoking.

The F.D.A. said it was still gathering information about the drug, but advised doctors to closely monitor patients taking Chantix for behavior changes. Sales of the drug totaled $101 million last year. The agency said it was investigating at least one incident involving Chantix and a violent death.

Family members of a musician in Dallas, Carter Albrecht, recently said that Chantix might have caused the rage that led to his death. Mr. Albrecht was shot in the head in September by his girlfriend’s neighbor as he tried to kick down the man’s door. An autopsy report showed that Mr. Albrecht’s blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit.

The agency said it had asked Pfizer for information on additional cases that might be similar. Regulators said it was unclear if Chantix was directly responsible for the behavior, because nicotine withdrawal often aggravates existing mental problems. Pfizer, which is based in New York, also submitted reports to the agency on increased drowsiness among patients taking Chantix.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi-tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

*********************

Smoking and mental illness

Smoking correlates with ALL indices of social disadvantage. You mostly have to be dumb, poor or mad to smoke these days

Virtually everyone knows about the connection between smoking and health. Smoking causes 440,000 deaths a year in the United States (50,000 of which are from exposure to secondhand smoke) and 5 million worldwide. It shortens smokers' lives by 10 to 15 years, and those last few years can be a miserable combination of breathlessness and pain.

But few are aware that smoking is concentrated among people with mental illness, often compounded by substance-abuse disorders such as alcoholism. Go to most Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and the room will be so full of smoke that you can cut it with a knife. Ask the members, and they will tell you that it was much easier to stop drinking than to stop smoking. Indeed, nicotine, the addictive component of tobacco smoke, is as habituating as cocaine or heroin, and it has a similar effect on chemical receptors in the brain.

The facts about smoking and mental illness are stark. Almost half of all cigarettes sold in the United States (44 percent) are consumed by people with mental illness. This is because so many people who have mental illnesses smoke (50 to 80 percent, compared with less than 20 percent of the general population) and because they smoke so many cigarettes a day - often three packs. Furthermore, smokers with mental illness are much more likely to smoke their cigarettes right down to the filters.

Yet for years, mental health professionals ignored smoking. Why did patients, their families and clinicians do nothing to help smokers quit? One reason is well-intended but uninformed compassion. The reasoning goes something like: "Poor Joe is suffering so much from his illness and gets such pleasure from his cigarettes that I don't want to take them away from him."

Another reason lies in the extent to which smoking is integrated into mental health treatment. In psychiatric hospitals the denial of the opportunity to take a smoke break is used as a disciplinary tool, and cigarettes have become part of the culture - often being traded for goods or sexual favors as a form of currency.

Another factor is that many clinicians who work with people with mental illness have themselves recovered from psychiatric conditions, including substance abuse, but have not been able to stop smoking. They feel hypocritical about trying to help patients quit when they are unable to do so themselves.

After years of tolerating, and even encouraging, smoking among people with mental illness, mental health professionals are beginning to recognize the hazards of smoking. Two things have been especially powerful: the spread of facts about secondhand smoke dangers and a recent analysis showing that people with chronic mental illness die 25 years earlier than the rest of the population, with many of those lost years attributable to smoking.

So, what can be done to help people with mental illness stop smoking? Despite strong addictions or concerns about patients' quality of life, this isn't a futile effort. Like the general population, most smokers with mental health conditions would like to quit. Although their odds of actually quitting are not as high - about half that of smokers who don't have mental health conditions - there are many success stories.

Opportunities exist in both hospital and community settings. There is a growing trend to make mental health hospitals smoke-free, both indoors and on their campuses. For the first time ever, more than half of these institutions in the United States are now smoke-free, and those numbers are increasing. Predicted complications of increased violence and the need for disciplinary actions in the wake of going smoke-free have proved false. In fact, removing smoking as a cause of staff-patient friction has meant fewer violent incidents and more opportunity for staff to interact therapeutically with clients. Tools to help smokers quit - including counseling and drugs such as nicotine replacement, buproprion and varenicline - are available but are still greatly underused.

It will not be easy to reverse the long alliance of smoking and mental illness. But the fact that mental health clinicians and patient and family advocacy groups have recognized the problem and are willing to address it is an essential first step toward wellness.

Source





Researchers strike gold in meningococcal disease fight

Meningococcal disease can strike with frightening speed. Its victims can present with symptoms in the morning and be dead by nightfall. But now, a breakthrough by researchers might go some way to reducing meningococcal fatalities by making it significantly easier to detect the bacteria. It involves the use of nanotechnology, and more specifically, the use of small gold particles being injected into suspected sufferers.

Larraine Pocock knows more about meningococcal disease than most. But it hasn't always been that way. It wasn't until her 21-year-old son Troy travelled to England for a working holiday that she began learning all about the deadly disease. "We got a call from Chelsea Hospital - he'd been admitted and he was critical," she told AM. "We were to ring back in an hour, and I asked them what they thought it was and they thought it was meningitis, and I just realised how serious that was, so I rang back in an hour and he was actually on life support. "So, we rushed to Sydney to try and get to London, but he was to pass away that night."

Ms Pocock now runs a meningococcal foundation named in honour of her son, the Troy Pocock Foundation, based on the New South Wales south coast. She has welcomed the news that new technology might be able to detect the disease within 15 minutes, a far cry from the current testing procedure, which can take up to 48 hours. "Meningococcal disease attacks very quickly and you can be well at breakfast, and you can be actually dead by dinnertime," she said.

Meningococcal disease affects 700 people in Australia each year and 10 per cent of those who contract meningococcal will die from the disease. About 20 per cent of those who contract it will have permanent disabilities.

A prototype device has been developed for the new technology, which involves molecular-sized flecks of gold being covered with antibodies that will attract the protein present in meningococcal bacteria. Jeanette Pritchard is involved in the development of the new technology, which has been designed by Melbourne's RMIT University. She says it has already proven highly successful in tests, and could pave the way for a significant reduction in deaths from meningococcal. "The test result will show either a yes that bacteria are present in the sample, or no the bacteria aren't present," she said. "So, it will basically given an indication that yes, treatment needs to be administered." She says the technology is still in development, but could be in clinics within three years.

Ms Pocock says that while the development of the new technology is welcome, it's far from being a panacea. "We've still got to like raise the awareness for the parent or the teacher or the carer to, you know, take the child to the doctor or the hospital first," she said.

Source

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Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi-tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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USING YOUR BRAIN A LOT DOES HELP PROTECT YOU FROM ALZHEIMER'S -- BUT WE STILL DON'T KNOW HOW

The study below had a fairly good range of controls, though the reliance on self-report is troubling. Nonetheless the controls used do confer some authority on the conclusion. A bit puzzling that they observed no brain changes that could explain the effect, however. More fine-grained brain observations may be needed or the reliance on self-report abandoned. Peer ratings would be one alternative to self-reports. Abstract below

Relation of cognitive activity to risk of developing Alzheimer disease

By R. S. Wilson et al.

Background: Frequent cognitive activity in old age has been associated with reduced risk of Alzheimer disease (AD), but the basis of the association is uncertain.

Methods: More than 700 old people underwent annual clinical evaluations for up to 5 years. At baseline, they rated current and past frequency of cognitive activity with the current activity measure administered annually thereafter. Those who died underwent a uniform postmortem examination of the brain. Amyloid burden, density of tangles, and presence of Lewy bodies were assessed in eight brain regions and the number of chronic cerebral infarctions was noted.

Results: During follow-up, 90 people developed AD. More frequent participation in cognitive activity was associated with reduced incidence of AD (HR = 0.58; 95% CI: 0.44, 0.77); a cognitively inactive person (score = 2.2, 10th percentile) was 2.6 times more likely to develop AD than a cognitively active person (score = 4.0, 90th percentile). The association remained after controlling for past cognitive activity, lifespan socioeconomic status, current social and physical activity, and low baseline cognitive function. Frequent cognitive activity was also associated with reduced incidence of mild cognitive impairment and less rapid decline in cognitive function. Among 102 persons who died and had a brain autopsy, neither global nor regionally specific measures of neuropathology were related to level of cognitive activity before the study, at study onset, or during the course of the study.

Conclusion: Level of cognitively stimulating activity in old age is related to risk of developing dementia.

NEUROLOGY 2007;69:1911-1920






Cannabis compound 'halts cancer'

I kinda think I have heard all this before

A compound found in cannabis may stop breast cancer spreading throughout the body, US scientists believe. The California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute team are hopeful that cannabidiol or CBD could be a non-toxic alternative to chemotherapy. Unlike cannabis, CBD does not have any psychoactive properties so its use would not violate laws, Molecular Cancer Therapeutics reports. The authors stressed that they were not suggesting patients smoke marijuana. They added that it would be highly unlikely that effective concentrations of CBD could be reached by smoking cannabis.

CBD works by blocking the activity of a gene called Id-1 which is believed to be responsible for the aggressive spread of cancer cells away from the original tumour site - a process called metastasis. Past work has shown CBD can block aggressive human brain cancers. The latest work found CBD appeared to have a similar effect on breast cancer cells in the lab.

Lead researcher Dr Sean McAllister said: "Right now we have a limited range of options in treating aggressive forms of cancer. "Those treatments, such as chemotherapy, can be effective but they can also be extremely toxic and difficult for patients. "This compound offers the hope of a non-toxic therapy that could achieve the same results without any of the painful side effects."

Dr Joanna Owens of Cancer Research UK said: "This research is at a very early stage. "The findings will need to be followed up with clinical trials in humans to see if the CBD is safe, and whether the beneficial effects can be replicated. "Several cancer drugs based on plant chemicals are already used widely, such as vincristine - which is derived from a type of flower called Madagascar Periwinkle and is used to treat breast and lung cancer. It will be interesting to see whether CBD will join them."

Maria Leadbeater of Breast Cancer Care said: "Many people experience side-effects while having chemotherapy, such as nausea and an increased risk of infection, which can take both a physical and emotional toll. "Any drug that has fewer side-effects will, of course, be of great interest." But she added: "It is clear that much more research needs to be carried out."

Source

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Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correla-tion coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi-tions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal-ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi-tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

*********************