Number 95 : February 1999 |
A Diet to Die For: Do you follow healthy eating advice ? Perhaps you read avidly all the latest reports on what are the best foods to eat if you want to avoid cancer, or heart disease. A potential anti-carcinogen is sulphoraphane, a compound broken down from glucosolinates found in broccoli. Trouble is the amounts available in individual helpings of broccoli tend to be erratic. Never mind: a group at the John lnnes Institute near Norwich are cross-breeding broccoli with a variety of wild cabbage hopefully to increase the amount. At least broccoli aren't being genetically engineered, yet. Tomatoes are being genetically engineered. Working vvith a biotechnology company, a professor at the University of London's Royal Holloway College has succeeded in doubling the amounts of certain carotenoids in tomatoes, specifically lycopene and beta-carotene, which are believed to reduce the incidence of certain cancers and heart diseases. All very laudable you might think; but where might it lead ?
Laboratories in Europe are working on disease-reducing peppers, carrots, and rice. It is reported that in the U.S. a group of volunteers have been immunised against E.coli by eating a type of raw potato. Recently (September), the British Journal of Nutrition published a supplement on functional foods: otherwise known as intelligent foods; pharma-foods; or nutraceuticals.
The trouble is that the human body is not like a piece of machinery. The fuel to power a piece of machinery does not become part of the machine. When a machine wears out then, apart from any products of corrosion, all the bits you're left with were there when it was new. In your case almost all the bits you started with are now long gone. You are continuously being re-made out of the food you eat. Part of this process is the production of substances which protect you from disease. Millions of years of evolution have done quite a reasonable job of fixing just how much you need.
Evolution isn't a perfect system. A couple of extra arms or a third eye could be quite useful, but you are inevitably a history of what you were. If you want anything extra the answer from evolution would often be the same as that of the simple yokel asked for directions who replied, "Well, I wouldn't start from here". In your case 'here' is a system whereby the amounts of protective substances are a balance of opposites. If you get too much of a good thing you will produce something to neutralise the excess, like blood sugar and insulin. If the good thing is being supplied as extra benefit from elsewhere the body need not bother making it at all, or worse, only make its antidote and before long the extra benefit becomes essential.
Of course, we can trust the scientists to bear this in mind, can't we ? Well, you can if you want, but these days scientific opinion is not so much formed as bought and paid for. If XYZ Co. plc. can produce a food which disrupts the natural process and makes you dependent on their product can you doubt that they'll be able to buy as much scientific opinion as they need ? Any distinction there might have been between food and drugs, if ever there was any, threatens to become blurred.
Has the time come anyway to ask serious questions of medical so-called progress ? It may be psychologically beneficial to treat disease but does it make sense biologically? Putting right faults can help the individual until they die of something else; but not putting them right may remove the fault from future generations entirely. How much of medical intervention is clumsy and ill-considered? You have a streptococci infection: the bacteria thrive on the iron in your blood. Your G.P. prescribes ferrous sulphate tablets for your anaemia; but your anaemia is a result of your body refusing to release reserves of iron from your liver because of the streptococci. Of course, if you’re lucky, your G.P. probably gives you antibiotics as well; but where does the benefit from antibiotics go in the long run: to the human race; or to the bacteria ? Natural Selection works in two ways on bacteria, which can evolve a lot faster than you can. In one they benefit by keeping you alive as long as possible; in two they benefit by being easily and quickly distributed, in which case keeping you alive becomes irrelevant. Antibiotics favour the latter.
The foreword to the 'functional foods' supplement reads, 'We stand today at the threshold of a new frontier in nutritional sciences'. This threshold looks suspiciously to me like the banks of the Rubicon: and we all know what happened to Caesar, don't we ?
Stef Gula (C94/16) is quite right to distrust the ‘"Right to Life" brigade’. All "Right to......." claimants are troublemakers.
Cynical twaddle ! (John Stubbings C94/14) Sorry; but I can't understand art, except as a residual activity from a once-useful procedure. Pictography is recognised as a means of ancient communication and I can think of few things more important to communicate about at that time than hunting. Old habits die hard but the potential for misinterpretation of them over a considerable period of time might well make 'the role art plays in primitive culture nowadays and in the recent past' as equally irrelevant as your 'night club' or John Neary's 'teenage vandalism' (C94/15). The pleasure we currently derive from art may not be dissimilar to that experienced by Rick Street's flea picking monkeys (C94/33), though the activity is arguably less useful: the natural selection of writing, and, much later, photography having swept past the artists leaving them chipping and daubing in the dustpan of history.
I cannot let pass the opportunity to congratulate Frank Walker (C94/6) on his excellent idea. If introduced promptly it might even ward off the Extermination of Criminals programme introduced after the 2030 election.
Anthony Owens
Anthony : I agreed with most of what you had to say on diet. We do seem to steam on with an unjustifiable feeling of optimism that everything will turn out all right in the end, rather than that we’ve started an arms race with the micro-biotic world that, in the long term, we might lose. Maybe there is a plague on the way that will be virtually unstoppable, as the black death was. All that can be said is that we seem to have got away with it so far, and what are the alternatives ? We do, though, need strong regulatory agencies to protect us from the unscrupulous XYZ Co.
Theo