I love the idea of eating high quality, hand crafted meals consisting of foods grown within only a few miles from where I sit… Of course, I also consider this to be a personal vagary, since there is no real, documented data to support many of the modern pseudo-science claims that ‘Natural’, Organic’, “Free Range’, or any of the other feel good attributes make any quantifiable difference in our eating habits.
A personal vagary…
I have always wondered about the wish fulfillment based thinking which these topics seem to generate. In any case, now that I have flown my curmudgeon flag high, here are a few articles which attempt to substantiate some of the views I think need to presented in the open, clean air (shouldn’t words and ideas be entitled to similar forms of natural and organic presentations?).
Detoxifying fashionably
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/06/detoxifying_fashionably.php
How many times have I read or heard from believers in "alternative" medicine that some disease or other is caused by "toxins"? I honestly can’t remember, but in alt-world, no matter what the disease or condition under discussion is, there’s a good chance that sooner or later it will be linked to "toxins." It doesn’t matter if it’s cancer, autism, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, or that general malaise that comes over people who, as British comedians Mitchell and Webb put it, have more money than sense; somehow, some way, someone will invoke "toxins."
I was reminded of this obsession among believers in unscientific medicine a couple of weeks ago, when I came across an article by Guy Trebay in the New York Times entitled The Age of Purification. The article appeared, appropriately enough, in the Fashion section and was festooned with photos of cupping, surely one of the silliest of the many "detoxification" modalities that alternative medicine practitioners use to claim to draw the "toxins" out of their clients through the application of, well, cups or various other containers in which the air had been heated in order to generate negative pressure when sealed to the skin and presumably thus bring them to a greater level of purification and health. Indeed, the only "detoxification" rituals sillier than cupping that I can think of, off the top of my head are detoxifying footpads, and "detox foot baths."
Oh, wait. Scratch that. I forgot about ear candling, which must surely be the undisputed silliest "detox" treatment of all time–until someone thinks of an even sillier one…or not. There are just so many silly "detox" procedures that it’s hard to select a "winner."
Be that as it may, Trebay mixes sarcasm with exposition throughout his article in a rather amusing way that’s worth quoting:
My friend, like everyone else around, seemed to believe that mysterious, amorphous sludge had lodged in the anatomical crannies of half the local adult population. Unseen toxins were lurking, like Communists during the Red Scare.
The "toxins" required elimination, somehow, and thus at lunches, at cocktails, at dinner parties, normal conversations turned abruptly from the day’s news to progress reports on juice fasts, energy alignments, radical purging. From painful sessions with traditional healers to toxin-leaching treatments designed, it might seem, to clean out not just body but wallet, a surprising number of New Yorkers (not all of them well-to-do neurotics) are caught up in a new New Age, the Age of Purification.
How had it happened, I wondered, that so many otherwise sensible, urban people found themselves in the grip of a dreadful feeling that systems are down? "I just bought five pounds of carrots, ginger, and kale and put it all in my Breville juicer and pounded that all day," said a corporate adviser of my acquaintance, far from a credulous woo-woo type.
Of course, as we have noted so many times before, hard-nosed skepticism in one area of one’s life does not necessarily translate to other areas. Many are the people who would never ever fall prey to scams in business, for example, but happily fork over money for scams such as "detox footpads"–or fall for anti-vaccine quackery, like J.B. Handley. Whatever the case, why this fascination with "detoxification" in alternative medicine? Why do so many of its treatments, be they dietary, chelation therapy, purges, colon cleanses, or whatever, claim to eliminate "toxins"? Why is it that, if you Google "alternative medicine" and "detoxification," you find so many references, some of which claim external toxins need to be eliminated, some of which claim that internal toxins need to be purged, and still more of which blame various "parasites" for all manner of health distress. There’s even a line of products called Detoxify, complete with different products for taking care of "high toxicity" and "regular toxicity."
In this post, I’ll try to explain, but first a little history–self-history that is.
"You’re poisoning yourself from within!"
My first encounter with the concept of "detoxification" (at least, as it is described in alternative medicine terms) occurred perhaps 10 or 15 years ago, after I had been out of medical school several years and completed my surgery education. Basically, an acquaintance of mine had on her bookshelf on "body cleansing." Given how much I’ve delved into "alternative" medical practices in the last several years, it’s truly amazing to realize that for the majority of my adult life I had no clue what "detoxification" was or what "colon cleanses" were. My ignorance at the time aside, I don’t remember the title, and I don’t remember the author, but I do remember that, as I leafed through the book, it became rapidly clear to me that "body cleansing" had nothing to do with taking a shower or a bath, at least not in this book. In particular, my attention was riveted to a chapter entitled "Death begins in the colon."
It turns out that the admonition to beware of your colon trying to kill you came from a chiropractor named Dr. Bernard Jensen, DC, who is apparently known as the "father of colonics." Personally, that would not be a name or title that I’d be particularly interested in having ascribed to me, but then I’m not a chiropractor. My avoidance of icky titles aside, this was my first ever real encounter with the nitty-gritty (much of the grit within the stool) of colon cleansing. What followed were two chapters, the first telling readers how supposedly up to 20 lbs. of fecal waste lurks in their colons, producing "toxins" that slowly poison them, the symptoms of which manifest themselves as lethargy and a sense of not feeling well, coupled with any or all of a huge number of potential conditions, including diabetes, hypertension, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and many others. What’s the solution?
Guess.
Yes, the solution, as I wrote about long ago, is colon cleansing, and this was my first encounter, up close and personal, so to speak, with the concept. What followed were long and rather lovingly limned descriptions of the vast quantities of feces, along with–dare I say it?–almost pornographic-seeming photos of what people fish out of their toilet after colon cleanses. (For examples of the sorts of photos that I encountered, click here, but only if you have a strong stomach.)
Organic = Good, Right? OOOPS!
http://bigthink.com/ideas/38938
Organic = Good, and Mass-produced = Bad…Right? The latest example that that assumption is naïve, and wrong, and potentially dangerous, is the recent discovery that the worst food-borne disease outbreak in Europe in decades may have been carried by organic bean sprouts. But don’t pick on the sprouts, and don’t even pick on Organic. The danger here is the way you and I perceive and respond to risk, a subconscious decision making process that often works well, but which sometimes can create risks all by itself.
Setting aside the issue of whether organic food is intrinsically any healthier than non-organic food, or safer because pesticides have not been used, organic farming offers no advantages over non-organic agriculture when it comes to by far the greatest risk our food poses, the risk that what we eat might carry germs. The suspected sprouts in Germany are only the most recent example of organically produced food believed to have made people sick. Organic eggs and spinach and lettuce have caused big outbreaks in the U.S. in the past few years. The way those foods are produced and processed and shipped is part of the risk, but we make it worse because of the positive/healthy/better-for-you reputation organic food enjoys. That encourages the assumption that organic food poses less danger of carrying disease. That leads to less of the caution that should be applied in handling all foods; washing, cooking, temperature control. So our benign assumptions about organic food can raise our risk.
But this is just one small example of a larger and more profound phenomenon, something which in “How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Match the Facts” I call The Perception Gap, when our feelings about a risk don’t match the facts, and the gap between our emotions and the evidence creates risks of its own. Here are a few others similar to organic food;
– We are less afraid of herbal and natural medicines than of the human-produced kind – pharmaceuticals. That can be dangerously dumb. Ephedra and St. John’s Wort are just a couple high profile cases of natural drugs that caused harm. A 2004 study of Ayurvedic herbal medicines found that one sample in five purchased from local stores in Boston contained up to 10,000 times more lead, mercury, or arsenic than U.S. safety standards deemed safe.
– Most of us are less afraid of radiation from the sun, which causes 1.3 million cases of skin cancer a year in the U.S. and approximately 8,000 deaths from melanoma, than radiation from cell phones and nuclear power plants.
– We are less afraid of mixing the genes of plants indiscriminately by “natural” hybridization than by the much more precise and controlled process of changing just one gene in a lab.
What’s the common thread in what seems like so much irrationality? The perception of risk is not just a matter of the facts, but also depends on how those facts feel. One of the subconscious psychological filters we apply when assessing how scary something feels is whether it’s natural or human-made. Natural risks feel less scary. Human-made risks feel scarier. The sun is far more likely to give you cancer than radiation from a nuclear power plant or a cell phone or from power lines, but the sun is natural and the others are human-made, so even though they are all radiation risks, they don’t feel the same.
