Vitamin D & The Dark Side of Science

In case you missed it, Vitamin D is currently a food-group. In 2005 the Harvard School of Public Health revised the food pyramid to include, among other things, multivitamins and in particular Vitamin D.

Controversy over the traditional food pyramid – which was ingrained in my childhood memory from cereal box spines – was getting out of hand. Its large base of “bread, cereal, rice, & pasta” placed heavy emphasis on carbs, while the meats and protein section failed to differentiate between less healthy red meats and leaner sources of protein. Other complaints included questionable influence from special interests - particularly those of the pernicious potato lobby - on the original pyramid, which was formed by the USDA. Between the alarming rise of obesity in America, and those confusing dots on the old pyramid that make it look like it’s from Star Wars, many thought that the food pyramid was overdue for a makeover.

Enter the The Harvard Food Pyramid, which was formed using the very latest in peer review scientific research. And yet it’s a mockery of science and public health all the same.

You’ll notice that its base, instead of “bread, cereal, rice, & pasta”, consists of “daily exercise & weight control”, featuring a collage of cartoony clip-art sneakers, dumbbells, a ping-pong paddle, feet standing on a scale, and, at the right, a plate consisting of some of the very same foods that, above, it says to use sparingly. The food pyramid is also fiber-heavy, going so far as to place white bread in the use sparingly category. The mid-section has a whole box for “nuts, seeds, beans, & tofu”. And salt is included in the “use sparingly section”. From the pyramid’s inedible base to its strange emphasis on Vitamin D, it represents much of what is wrong with science today.

The next bit focuses on two specific criticisms (Vitamin D & salt) before returning to larger issues covering science and national policy in general.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D has very few empirically demonstrated benefits, and yet medical researchers seem to be all up in a tizzy about it. A large group of scientists has hailed that the general population’s Vitamin D deficiency is of epidemic proportions, but it’s not clear whether supplementation is the solution. And it's not like we haven't been trying. For years, almost all milk, most cereals and many juices have been Vitamin D fortified, and yet this epidemic persists. Their response is to recommend massive (up to 2x for children) increases in the amount of recommended daily intake, which is typical of what happens when you combine bad medicine with bad government: If at first you don't succeed, try doubling the dose.

Skepticism about these recommendations, however, should come from previous treatment research with Vitamin D. Deficiencies have been empirically correlated with numerous conditions – from obesity and multiple sclerosis to schizophrenia – but treatment studies have found null or inconsistent at best results using Vitamin D.

As we all know, correlation doesn’t equal causation.
And furthermore, Vitamin D correlates with sun exposure & outdoor activity, which can create all sorts of confounds.

In lack of sound theory, studies using Vitamin D as a treatment are highly speculative, and the push to expand guidelines for the public mirrors this: The results might be spurious; they might be tied to how Vitamin D’s metabolized; they might be due to poor lab testing (an issue that was raised just this week); or the original guidelines might have been wrong. The potential harms of these recommendations range from Vitamin D toxicity to wasted money and effort. While the potential benefits are speculative at best.

Most importantly, these efforts lack supporting treatment studies and sound theory – which might just cover a few basics, like why the levels are off in the general public, and how correcting them will help. Without such information, public health experts can’t afford to guess and experiment with the public at their will. For all we know, Vitamin D might be off for a good reason. That may sound silly, but the bottom line is that we just don't know, particularly in lack of any plausible & semi-backed theory. We can't just go around using correlations to dictate public policy.

Salt

Proponents of the war against obesity have declared salt as part of the axis of evil. And salt does make you fat by retaining water (although this is just temporary as it’s urinated out like most minerals). But it’s a key mineral. It’s essential for food digestion, hydration, and other basic functions. Furthermore it has a laxative effect, which may offset some of its water-retention effects on weight. Salt likely increases food satiety by aiding digesting. Long-term salt deprivation is a real concern, and insofar as it hinders absorption, it might even lead to overeating. And further, hydrating with extra fluids won’t offset the effects salt deprivation, because it’ll just cause you to urinate more of it out.

You could hear the cry of public health from the beginning of the previous paragraph: Sure, we all need salt. But in our modern diets of processed foods we generally eat way too much of it. In this context, eating too much salt is a much greater danger than eating too little salt. This sentiment may have a kernel of truth (assuming it's correct, & it might not be, given the plethora of low-sodium options that’ve popped up). But note that’s not the same as using salt sparingly.

The essence of the argument, then, is that modern diets are too salty, so experts have to over-compensate by telling people to err on using too little salt. This gets at the heart of the problem.

Telling People What to Do



What, then, is the role of the updated and scientific food pyramid? Is it to give people the correct amounts of food to eat, or to steer people away from eating supposedly unhealthy foods that are deemed by experts to be too prevalent in our society? It’s clear that the latter is the case, and the guidelines aren’t meant to be followed absolutely. Further evidence for this is seen in the foundation of the new food pyramid, which isn’t even food at all, but includes exercise and weighing.

What we're dealing with here is a food pyramid whose foundation, in no figurative or uncertain terms, is not food. Unfortunately, this sort of scientific double-speak extends beyond food policy.

Spiraling Further Out

The points I bring up aren’t a hot controversy because the food pyramid itself is relatively worthless. People might follow a few recommendations, but they generally eat what they want. The obesity “epidemic”, if you want to call it such, wasn’t caused by a bad food pyramid, and it won’t be corrected by a good one.

My frustrations, however, are more directed towards the source of such inane self-gratifying efforts, which include science and academia, whose recommendations and prescriptive science often overstep their bounds. This is a particular problem in this day of age, as Obama campaigned on a platform of giving “enlightened” science its due place in society. I worry that this “due place” may border on implementing a totalitarian state for the public, guided by the dimly lit headlights of power-hungry scientists and Ivory Tower academics. This paints a grim picture, particularly when combined with Obama’s socialist-leanings. With the push for universal healthcare, the individual's business will become a lot more of everyone’s business, as we’ll have to pay the price for our unhealthy citizens – a problem that I’m sure many individual researchers will claim that they can solve given enough funding and power. Global warming science and policy, which rests on an equally shaky foundation, has promulgated, & will continue to, in the much the same manner. In the meanwhile, we have the power of Vitamin D (bolstered, perhaps, by man-made global warming) to cure our existing ailments.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Strange Attractor, 04/21/2007, by Steve Jurveston; (2) USDA Food Pyramid, 1992 (3) Harvard School of Public Health, Healthy Eating Food Pyramid, 2005; (4) Comic from xkcd.com, A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language; (5) Milk Shelves at Whole Foods, 06/01/2008, by Stephanie Booth; (6) Cat Conspiracy, 09/04/2006, by Craig Elliott; (7) salt and pepper, 06/13/2006, by Hobvias Sudoneighm; (8) Joseph Stalin, 10/27/2006, Freedom Toast;

Video: (1) Music video, 03/04/2007, littlewonder80's channel, of the song "The Guns of Brixton" by The Clash from the 1979 album London Calling. Sphere: Related Content

Turbulence

The Age of Turbulence abruptly begins with Alan Greenspan on a flight across the Atlantic. The captain brings him up front and tells him that the World Trade Towers were hit, and the plane had been redirected back to Zurich. It was 9/11, and he recalls his racing thoughts about what this would mean for the new world. Second to his wife, his obvious concern was for the economy. It was clear that the terrorists weren’t directly after the financial system, or else they would’ve hit the banks, but everyone knows that a sound economy abhors such instability.

“The mood in the cockpit was somber,” writes Greenspan. “’You’ll never believe this,’ the captain said, ‘Listen.’ I put my ear to the headset but couldn’t hear anything other than static. ‘Normally the North Atlantic is full of radio chatter,’ he explained. ‘This silence is eerie.’ Apparently nobody was out there.”

Greenspan recalls the likewise eerie aura on Capital Hill over the next year. Everybody kept insisting that America was safe and her citizens should stay calm, but there was no concrete evidence for this; and in contrast to their words, it looked like White House officials were bracing for a second large-scale attack, as if it was more of a question of when, instead of whether, it would happen.

Amidst the chaos and the aftermath, however, Greenspan was rather surprised about how the economy managed to get itself right back onto its feet. While it did involve some minor tinkering with air-travel and communications, for the most part, business as normal resumed rather soundly.

The lesson that Greenspan took away was that it reflected the rigidity of the economy. 9/11 left a political and social gash on the country, but from the eyes of the economy, it was just a blip on the radar. For Greenspan 9/11 was a testament to the strength and independence of the US economy.

It borders on irony that less than a year after publishing his monumental autobiography – 544 pages long, and with an $8.5 million advance from Penguin Press – his book is already outdated, with the banking system on the brink of failure and the US potentially facing the worst depression since the 1930's. Indeed, the economy is sound and it is rigid. But it seems to be a beast onto itself - strong enough to bear external blows as heavy as 9/11, while anything but immune to its own internal writhing and convulsions.

The Blame Game

Jim Cramer recently had a comedic, and quite frankly shameful, run-in with Jon Stewart, in which Cramer blamed his interviewees for lying to him. No doubt the blame game has just begun.

Bernanke, Greenspan’s successor, recently came out with his most emotional statement yet, in part blaming AIG’s irresponsible risk-taking for the collapse.

“If there’s a single episode in this entire 18 months that has made me more angry, I can’t think of one, than AIG,” he said. “AIG exploited a huge gap in the regulatory system. There was no oversight of the financial products division. This was a hedge fund, basically, that was attached to a large and stable insurance company, made huge numbers of irresponsible bets, took huge losses. There was no regulatory oversight because there was a gap in the system.”

Of course what Bernanke partly overlooks is expanding credit in the economy – largely through the rise of credit default swaps – which AIG was in part responsible for backing up. Credit-expansion during a boom is one thing, but similar to investment banking it crumbles when the economy falters in the least. Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns can blame their falls on the stock market; creditors can blame their problems on the lack of funds to repay debts; and Bernanke can blame it all on those who were responsible for backing the expansion of credit. But what’s shortsighted is a thorough examination of the system in and of itself.

Communism, after all, would work perfectly if only the laborers worked hard. Yet blaming the fall of communism on laborers' laziness is futile, because they’re not working for a reason: No incentives.

Every society has its screw-ups. Shit happens as Forest Gump might say. But society banks on the fact that these screw-ups remain small in number and are randomly dispersed. When their numbers grow and their mistakes become more apparent, then you have to start looking for other answers. In other words, you have to dig deeper when shit starts happening in a frequent and consistent manner.

Which is why the notion of an "insurance" company that backs credit defaults is absurd, because the frequency of credit shit happening is non-random and inter-dependent. Other types of insurance depend on the fact that the covered averse events occur randomly and independently. If all of GEICO's customers, for instance, crashed their car on the same day, then it would surely go out of business, but that's not how car crashes work. However, such is how the credit business works, with one default often linked to another in a chain of events, having a similar effect as a massive car collision pile-up spanning the entire country would have on GEICO. Third parties can't feasibly "insure" credit contracts; you can't hedge the risk of credit defaults with successful creditors, because both events are tied to eachother. That's also why Bernanke's anger towards AIG is misdirected.

Indeed, AIG acted irresponsibly, but why were they in a linchpin position to aid in the collapse of the entire economy? Where were the corrective forces that should’ve come into play?

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Depression Economics

Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression (which I’ve just started) opens with a similar point regarding business cycles and failures: Just like screw-ups and bad-apples, they’re seen throughout society. What’s rare is when a nation experiences a string of failures – each tied to the other – and the economy as a whole (rather than any particular company) lacks the corrective forces to get back on track. The Great Depression, similar to current times, has been blamed on various individual enterprises, such as Galbraith’s 200-page rant against speculators of the 1920’s, or the accelerative properties of the capital goods sector. But these explanations ring hallow insofar as they’re always present, and, if true, are relatively non-specific to a particular time period.

Rothbard continues that the largest tragedy of the Great Depression wasn’t the pain forced upon the nation, but the dearth of literature explaining it. Most commentators on the subject agree. Indeed previously the country had seen various mini-crises, but they proved to be self-correcting within a year or two. The Great Depression was shocking, not because of the panic of 1929, but because of the huge length of time it took to be resolved.

Part of the dearth of study, Rothbard contends, is because few theories account for the business cycle. Recessions are conceptualized as the exception rather than the rule, and when they last for more than a few years, this is generally true. But that’s no reason to shy away from studying them. Insight can be gleaned from them, similar to an extreme medical case. Phinneas Gage – the railroad worker who had his frontal lobes shot through with an iron spike – was also the exception, but it was the extreme and curious nature of his state that kick started modern brain science as we know it today. Advances in neuroscience have only increased our understanding of Gage’s case, even a century and a half after the event. Such aberrations have proved invaluable to neuroscience and to medical science as a whole; and likewise economic aberrations should be a natural starting point for inquiry into economic theory. Unfortunately, the later is rarely the case, and we may have to wait much longer to understand current economic events.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Greenspan, 09/15/2007, by chickenhawkdown; (2)President George W. Bush address to the nation and joint session of Congress Sept. 20; (3) Plane, 02/20/2007, by ores2k; (4) Cover of Greenspan's 2007 book, The Age of Turbulence; (5) Ben Bernanke, 03/06/2006, by Simon; (6) Mad Money, 08/16/2007, by Carlos Gomez; (7) Murray Newton Rothbard, 02/01/2009, by Taylor; (8)Phineas Gage (Lesioni), 09/28/2008, by epanto.

Video: (1) Daily Show interview with Jim Cramer, of CNBC's Mad Money, 03/13/2009. Sphere: Related Content

Thru Fragments of Cinema: Objectivism Questioned

At 43 Jean Bauby suffered a stroke and awoke to find himself with locked-in syndrome – a rare condition, as terrifying as it sounds, in which the patient is almost completely paralyzed yet remains fully conscious and aware. Able to blink one eye, Bauby was taught to communicate one letter at a time with the help of an aid who recited the alphabet until he blinked. Using this system, Bauby authored the memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; I recently had the pleasure of seeing the movie based on it.

“I decided to stop pitying myself,” wrote Bauby, “Other than my eye, two things aren't paralyzed, my imagination and my memory.”

As the narrative digs deeper into Bauby’s trapped mind, it becomes increasingly sensuous, marked by bright colors, strong breezes, swirling cinematography and score.

He’s also visited by various friends. Some of them, like his elderly father, go so far as to compare their condition to his - one of a soul locked within the body. He’s visited by a distant friend who was held prisoner under inhumane conditions for 4-some years. You can lose your body, he advises Jean, but nothing can steal your humanity.

The film has an unfortunate tendency to wander, but its impact remains. Its underlying tragedy is universal: that of not knowing what you have until it’s gone. The narrative goes in 2 figurative directions corresponding to the metaphors in the title: The diving bell sinks further underwater and the butterfly flies effortlessly up.



The film strikes a chord with me, similar to the book Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which attests to the hollowness of objectivism. My political beliefs are generally libertarian, and in high school I enjoyed a few Ayn Rand novels. They seemed empowering at the time. But despite their food for thought, the ideas lacked staying-power with me. From the start, I never understood why her novels were so much more famous than her essays. Novels teach through experience. They’re a perfectly suitable way to get a lesson across, but they’re anything but an objective medium. After reading other authors in college, Rand seemed shallow in comparison.

Rand is often associated with libertarianism – even Alan Greenspan (who describes his views as libertarian-Republican) was deeply influenced by her in his youth. But aside from individualistic values, I’m not sure how much Rand overlaps with libertarianism.

I hate to throw around such intellectual jargon – as if they were interesting in and of themselves – but to come back down to the real world, undue objectivity can often pose more harm than good. Nowhere is this more evident than in the economy.


A frequent myth is the belief that the value of money is objective - that it's fixed. This mistake has led to hundreds of years of mistrust against certain ways to use money. Money-lending is almost universally despised, across cultures and religions, as a greedy way of using money to make money. Despite this hatred towards money-lending, using money to make money, in almost any other endeavor, is considered the norm. This is why the economy is built upon money-lending. Banks play an integral role by distributing money to be used for its greatest potential. Their distributive actions run contrary to liberal concerns about skewed distributions of income; however, trying to “fix” their distribution of money has as dire consequences as toying with income distribution.

Value is subjective. This is why banking works – the value of a small business loan to a businessman of great potential is greater than the value of that loan to someone who won’t know how to use it. Likewise, the value of lending money for interest is worth more to a rich man with no use for that money than to a poorer man. The value of receiving lent money is worth more to someone who needs it and has a reliable credit history. The value of giving a loan to someone with reliable credit is greater than the value of giving a loan to someone of poor credit. Viewed purely objectively, the whole economy – perhaps even freedom - really makes little sense.

Another danger of unbridled objectivity is the use of statistics. This is bared out in the common concern about lying with stats – obviously stats don’t lie themselves, it’s the people who use them that lie. Numbers are of course very objective. But their use – both in gathering and making sense of them – is considered more of an art.

Even Greenspan wrote that he supplemented statistics about the macroeconomy with more subjective measures. During the oil crisis of the Nixon years, he created measures to estimate weekly fluctuations in GDP, which included surveying small business owners about their present difficulties and concerns. The later were of comparable value to objective numbers. During the internet boom of the 1990’s, Greenspan noted that despite rises in GDP, surveys showed that workers were becoming more skittish about the economy, largely due to increased employee turnover. This discrepancy led him to conclude that the rising GDP & stock indexes gave the public an overly rosy depiction of the economy.

The takeaway point is that when the stats don’t seem to match reality, the fault is more often found with the former than the latter. This has vast implications, particularly for medicine, which alienates whatever it can’t explain as psychological or somatic. A large chunk of medical progress in the 20th century consisted reclassifying phenomena from psychological/somatic into medical. The fallacy however is that, at any given time, the categorization of conditions as psychological or somatic is thought to reflect the nature of the conditions rather than the progress of science. This has led to many misunderstandings between doctor and patient, and between researcher and object of study.

The vast difference between a human and a computer attests to how off objectivism is. It’s almost a tautology to say that we live in a subjective world. Objectivity is simply one tool among others. It can be a useful tool to help us crawl out of our locked-in subjective holes, but it can also lead to as many misconceptions as truths.

Even emotions – one of the cornerstones of subjectivity – evolved for useful objective reasons. Ignoring your emotions because they’re too subjective would be to block yourself off from one of your most carefully honed tools. I find them useful for intellectual discourse: When an idea just doesn't feel right (or wrong), you can use that as a springboard for further inquiry, and guide yourself in the right direction. Of course you can’t say that something is wrong because it feels that way. But you can use those emotions to then identify objective explanations. Objectivism's distinction between reason and irrationality is meaningless; as both reason and supposed irrationality can have the same utilitarian purpose in their proper contexts.

And what role do dreams play in a purely objective world? Consider what occurs when wake up and feel you've had an incredibly moving dream, but you try to describe to a friend to little avail. The dream's objective content somehow can't stand up to its subjective impact.

Objectivism’s biggest mistake is focusing on the “bottom line”. Because life occurs in everything above the bottom line. Humans come and go; they’re born and they’re dead; they consume calories and they expend calories; that’s the bottom line, that’s the objective perspective, as if from a disinterested party observing us from the moon. Obviously that perspective does injustice to the value of life. Robert Pirsig’s solution to the discrepancy between objective and subjective reality was to meld the two by focusing on the point where they meet. That’s quality, he believed. It's the value gained in voluntary exchange. It’s life. It's the loss that Jean Bauby suffered in the objective; the gain he won in the subjective.



-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Movie poster from the 2007 film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; (2)Photo of Jean-Dominique Bauby, 1997; (3) curving, swirling, 04/09/2006, by David Pham; (4) Logo from book cover of Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; (5) Portraits of Ayn Rand and Allan Greenspan; (6) Movie poster of the 2004 film The Merchant of Venice; (7) tools, 08/30/2006, by Striatic; (8) Blue Marble (Planet Earth), 01/25/2008, woodleywonderworks; (8) M.C. Escher's 1948 lithograph Drawing Hands.

Video: (1) Music collage, 02/08/2009, filmlasse with music from the 1959 film The 400 Blows. Sphere: Related Content