John Briffa reports on an interesting study whose conclusion indicates that a diet high in omega-3 fatty acids, already known to be important in preventing coronary heart disease, may also reduce the incidence of psychosis.
The omega-3 fats led to a statistically significant reduction in risk of individuals progressing to a full psychotic disorder over the course of the study: 4.9 per cent of those taking omega-3 became frankly psychotic compared to 27.5 per cent of those taking placebo. Symptoms associated with psychosis were also reduced and functioning was improved by the taking of omega-3 fats. Adverse events were similar in both groups.
The authors of this study concluded that omega-3 fats “reduce the risk of progression to psychotic disorder and may offer a safe and efficacious strategy for indicated prevention in young people with subthreshold psychotic states”.
Of course, you don’t want to state anything definitive from one study, but the difference in incidence is certainly significant. And, frankly, a higher omega-3 to omega-6 balance in your diet is a good idea, anyway. So if the prospect of better heart health isn’t enough for you to want to improve your omega-3 intake, then perhaps the prospect of not going mad will.
I will say, too, that this has a corrolary interest to my current reading about health and nutrition. It’s pretty well known from late-19th and early 20th century medical records that diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer were rare among native populations in Asia and Africa until they began eating a Westernized diet. But one thing I’ve picked up in my reading is that diagnoses of mental illness, compared to the Westernized populations, were also lower. I’ve not seen a hypothesis as to why that is, but perhaps the omega-3/omega-6 balance plays a role.
Incidentally, a great way to get more omega-3s without stomaching a nasty fish oil pill is simply to eat free range chicken, free range eggs, and grass-fed beef. Free range eggs are probably the most cost-effective way. Around my parts, getting a dozen free range eggs versus caged eggs is about $0.60 a dozen–much more cost effective than fish oil. And much tastier, too.
I am trying to figure out what world Jeffrey Jena lives in where Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Richard Roundtree, Edward G. Robinson, and Denzel Washington are “underrated tough guys.” I’m pretty sure they’d make just about anyone’s list, even for a term as undefined and ambiguous as “tough guy.”
In discussing Scott Horton’s infuriating article about a possible cover-up of the murder of prisoners at Gitmo, Conor Friedersdorf provides an excellent reminder of why I will not be voting Republican any time in the near future.
If I may address the skeptics on the right directly, it is penny wise and pound foolish to worry about creeping tyranny via government-run health care or gun control when we’re another terrorist attack away from popular support for an archipelago of secret prisons where anyone can be whisked away and tortured without any evidence against them. Look to Europe if you doubt whether government-run health care or black sites run by secret police are a more immediate threat to the liberty of innocents.
That about sums it right up, doesn’t it?
E.D. Kain is of the opinion that Scott Brown’s election heralds a return to “big-tent conservatism”, but I think he’s wrong on this point. For reasons surpassing my understanding, the hard-core conservative movement in this country has become utterly enthralled with any type of lawlessness and violence in the name of “fighting terrorism.” Core American values of decency, respect for liberty, and humane treatment of even our enemies have been dropped in favor of a self-proclaimed “Jacksonianism.”
Indeed, I think that this self-applied label is correct. Andrew Jackson is the patron saint of modern conservatism: anti-”elitist”, autocratic, jingoistic, and disrespectful of the rule of law. He was a man who valued loyalty above merit and power above principle. And that’s today’s GOP. The libertarians have utterly lost their battle for the soul of the Party. What little remains is being rhetorically harnessed to use as a tool against the Democratic Party, not for actual principled governance.
If the Republican Party actually cared about checking the power of the state, they’d be clamoring for trials of suspected terrorists in open court. Instead, Scott Brown and other Republicans have been clamoring for the Christmas Bomber to be sent to Gitmo, even though shoe-bomber Richard Reid was tried in Federal Court and is in prison right now. If the Republican Party truly wanted to hold government accountable for abuses and protect liberty against tyranny, they’d be clamoring to investigate allegations of abuse at Gitmo, Bagram, and everywhere else–but they’re clamoring for these things to be kept secret. If the Republican Party was serious about reining in deficits, they would demand that Medicare and Defense cuts be put on the table–but instead they’re lambasting Democrats for Medicare cuts and calling for increases in Defense spending.
For all of their pretensions as the protectors of liberty and free-markets, today’s GOP is nothing of the sort. And frankly, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
If you haven’t read Planet Hulk by Greg Pak, I highly recommend that you pick it up. It’s one of the best, most inventive stories about a mainstream superhero to come out in years. But if you don’t have the patience to read the comics, it looks like there’s an animated feature coming up–and it looks awesome:
Fellow heretic Jon Stonger has called my attention to this 2001 B.R. Myers takedown of the awful prose and terrible narrative that passes for modern “literary fiction.” I’m not going to excerpt very much here, but here’s a little taste:
The notion that contemporary fiction possesses greater relevance for us because it talks of the Internet or supermodels or familiar brand names is ridiculous. We can see ourselves reflected more clearly in Balzac’s Parisians than in a modern American who goes into raptures when his daughter says “Toyota Celica” in her sleep. This is not to say that traditional realism is the only valid approach to fiction. But today’s Serious Writers fail even on their own postmodern terms. They urge us to move beyond our old-fashioned preoccupation with content and plot, to focus on form instead—and then they subject us to the least-expressive form, the least-expressive sentences, in the history of the American novel. Time wasted on these books is time that could be spent reading something fun.
I think that, even nine years later, this is still true. This essay is worth reading for the takedown of Cormac McCarthy alone, who is quite possibly the most over-rated writer I’ve read. Is it so hard to use punctuation properly, really? At any rate, read the whole thing.
The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.
U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious “Crusade” in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.
One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
Personally, I want to buy one that’s encoded to remind people of Matthew 26:52.
Here’s an interesting paper from the International Journal of Biological Sciences which concludes that rats which are fed a diet of genetically modified corn show a higher degree of organ damage than rats which don’t. Part of the reason why this study is interesting is that the researchers did not themselves conduct the research. Rather, they analyzed the data provided by Monsanto and approved by various governments and subjected them to statistical analysis that they claimed was superior to that of Monsanto’s. Unfortunately, I don’t have the statistics background to judge which method is superior. (For the record, Monsanto’s response to this paper focuses on the statistical analysis, and you can read it here.) However, what I did find interesting was the researchers’ critiques of Monsanto’s methodology:
Only 10 rats were measured per group for blood and urine parameters and served as the basis for the major statistical analyses conducted. In addition, the investigators claimed that OECD guidelines and standards were followed. For each type of GM maize, only two feeding doses were tested per sex. This consisted of either 11 or 33% GM maize in an otherwise equivalent equilibrated diet; that is when the diet contained only 11% GM maize, the difference was made up by adding 22% non-GM maize (varieties not indicated). There were also two comparative control groups fed diets containing similar quantities of the closest isogenic or parental maize variety. Furthermore, groups of animals were also fed with diets containing one of six other normal (non-GM) reference maize lines; the same lines for the NK 603 and MON 810 tests, but different types for the MON 863 trials. We note that these unrelated, different non-GM maize types were not shown to be substantially equivalent to the GMOs. The quantity of some sugars, ions, salts, and pesticide residues, do in fact differ from line to line, for example in the non-GM reference groups. This not only introduced unnecessary sources of variability but also increased considerably the number of rats fed a normal non-GM diet (320) compared to the GM-fed groups (80) per transformation event, which considerably unbalances the experimental design. A group consisting of the same number of animals fed a mixture of these test diets would have been a better and more appropriate control. In addition, no data is shown to demonstrate that the diets fed to the control and reference groups were indeed free of GM feed.
[...]
The most fundamental point to bear in mind from the outset is that a sample size of 10 for biochemical parameters measured two times in 90 days is largely insufficient to ensure an acceptable degree of power to the statistical analysis performed and presented by Monsanto. For example, concerning the statistical power in a t test at 5%, with the comparison of 2 samples of 10 rats, there is 44% chance to miss a significant effect of 1 standard deviation (SD; power 56%). In this case to have a power of 80% would necessitate a sample size of 17 rats. Therefore, the statistical power is insufficient in these studies to allow an a priori dismissal of all significant effects. Indeed, this is true overall with the amplitude of the effects that can usually be observed within three months, in the case of usual chronic toxicity appearing after one year of treatment.
[...]
Moreover, to select significant results, they only contrasted the data sets from the 33% GM maize feeding groups (for NK 603 and MON 810) with all reference groups. Moreover, their biological interpretation of statistically significant results differs from case to case. In particular, sex differences were frequently used to reject pathological significance, despite the fact that this was without measuring effects on sex hormone levels. They also used the lack of linear dose-related effects, which is almost inevitable given that only two feeding doses were measured, to declare the diet as safe, as proposed for MON 863 GM maize. In the MON 863 experiments, the authors still failed to apply their declared methodology, which was slightly different. The ANOVA and contrast analysis (33% GM feeding dose versus controls) were in this case the determining criteria for evaluation of statistical significance, but only if the mean of the 33% GM feeding group was outside the range of the mean of the reference cohorts. All this increases noticeably the risks of false negative results.
In other words, according to the researchers, there were four primary problems with Monsanto’s study: (1) The sample sizes were in adequate; (2) There was no indication that the controls were true controls; (3) The study period of 90 days was too short to ascertain toxicity; and (4) Results appeared to be rejected by Monsanto without adequate justification.
Of course, it’s impossible for me to evaluate whether the authors claims are true because I don’t have access to Monsanto’s raw data: nobody does. Additionally, in their response to this paper, Monsanto does not respond to the methodological claims, so I don’t know what their justificaiton for this setup is. Which is not really Monsanto’s fault. For a number of legal reasons, Monsanto opens itself up to allowing proprietary information to be stolen by competitors if they publish their research data. That’s obviously not in their best interest. But it’s the law that opens them up to that risk, not some nefarious conspiracy.
For my own part, I don’t have anything against the genetic modification of crops for pest control and/or health reasons. I do, however, think that such crops need to be adequately tested before they are released into the market, and those tests should be conducted independently of the company marketing the product. I don’t know if the criticisms leveled by this article are correct or not. I can’t know, because the data isn’t transparent. That’s a real problem, and the government needs to provide a solution.
[For those interested in looking at this further, there's some pretty good discussion of this study (including the reputation of the journal itself) in the comments at BoingBoing.]
Next month, the credit card reforms that passed in may will be coming effective. If you’re curious to know how this will affect you and your accounts, there’s a good rundown at Get Rich Slowly.
The traditional story of the building of the great Egyptian pyramids is that they were built by armies of slaves. For those who get their history from Cecil B. DeMille, it’s often thought that these slaves were Jewish. However, recent research indicates that the builders of the pyramids may have been private contractors, instead.
Evidence from the site indicated the approximately 10,000 workers who built the pyramids had eaten 21 cattle and 23 sheep sent to them daily from farms in the Delta and Upper Egypt, said Dr Hawass.
This would suggest the farmers who sent the animals were not paying their taxes to the Egyptian government, but were sharing in one of Egypt’s national projects, he added.
The workers were employed for three-month stints, and the tombs, which date from the 4th and 5th Dynasties (2649-2374 BC), were for those who died during construction.
The authorities have long fought what they call the “myth” of slaves building the pyramids, saying it undermines the skill involved in their construction, and the sophistication of ancient Egypt’s civilisation.
This is just utterly fascinating to me. The history of Ancient Egypt is, sadly, something I don’t know enough about. I will say this though–I’m probably the only one, but this story prompted my memory of the story in Genesis which states how Egypt turned from a society of free laborers into a centrally-planned proto-feudal serfdom. It was all because of God’s chosen, Joseph, the son of Israel who became Prime Minister of Egypt.
There was no food, however, in the whole region because the famine was severe; both Egypt and Canaan wasted away because of the famine. Joseph collected all the money that was to be found in Egypt and Canaan in payment for the grain they were buying, and he brought it to Pharaoh’s palace. When the money of the people of Egypt and Canaan was gone, all Egypt came to Joseph and said, “Give us food. Why should we die before your eyes? Our money is used up.”
“Then bring your livestock,” said Joseph. “I will sell you food in exchange for your livestock, since your money is gone.” So they brought their livestock to Joseph, and he gave them food in exchange for their horses, their sheep and goats, their cattle and donkeys. And he brought them through that year with food in exchange for all their livestock.
When that year was over, they came to him the following year and said, “We cannot hide from our lord the fact that since our money is gone and our livestock belongs to you, there is nothing left for our lord except our bodies and our land. Why should we perish before your eyes—we and our land as well? Buy us and our land in exchange for food, and we with our land will be in bondage to Pharaoh. Give us seed so that we may live and not die, and that the land may not become desolate.”
So Joseph bought all the land in Egypt for Pharaoh. The Egyptians, one and all, sold their fields, because the famine was too severe for them. The land became Pharaoh’s, and Joseph reduced the people to servitude, from one end of Egypt to the other. However, he did not buy the land of the priests, because they received a regular allotment from Pharaoh and had food enough from the allotment Pharaoh gave them. That is why they did not sell their land.
Joseph said to the people, “Now that I have bought you and your land today for Pharaoh, here is seed for you so you can plant the ground. But when the crop comes in, give a fifth of it to Pharaoh. The other four-fifths you may keep as seed for the fields and as food for yourselves and your households and your children.”
“You have saved our lives,” they said. “May we find favor in the eyes of our lord; we will be in bondage to Pharaoh.”
There you go, folks. Biblical support for the nationalization of agriculture and a 20% gross income tax…
