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Today we reproduce the comment of our regular reader Ms Gaynor Lynch, on our recent piece about processed foods. Many thanks to her for taking the time to contact us:
Ultra-processed foods are bad for you – full stop. They are highly addictive and affect your brain chemistry so that you crave them more. Emerging research suggests ultra processed foods are particularly bad for not just the gut but the heart and brain as well, with mood and cognition badly affected.
There is an excellent excellent article in National Geographic on brain health but there is a pay wall. It may be available through your library service.
Abstract of research article in the journal Neurology on associations between ultra-processed food consumption and adverse brain health outcomes. Free, paywall to full article.
We at LSS think that this whole issue is only going to grow in the next few years and welcome the thoughts of any other readers who might care to join the debate
Following media speculation about No Sky Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a new syndrome sweeping the nation, LSS is proud to present this exclusive interview with Ann Doctor
LSS Is there really such a syndrome as No Sky Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (NSPTSD)?
AD Yes, NSPTSD is a new syndrome , but it’s very real nonetheless.
LSS What causes it? And what are the symptoms?
AD It happens when an otherwise healthy child is deprived of Sky TV in their formative years. It causes many tragic symptoms. A desire to stand out in the rain for long periods. A phobia about meeting important world leaders causing the sufferer to rush back to England to do an interview in ITV. To ignore obvious cues, such as the word “TITANIC” in the background, or hoping to rev things up by hanging around deserted motor car racing tracks in Northamptonshire. And otherwise make all kinds of gaffes, mistakes, blunders and unforced errors.
LSS is there any cure?
AD Generally we advise sufferers to collect as much money as they can and depart to a warm place, such as California, as soon as possible. And never, ever come back.
Followers of football often discuss the fate of Manchester United FC. A once hugely-successful club, awash with money that is now desperately underperforming, despite an endless stream of new mangers and fresh starts. Some compare it with the fate of Rome (the Empire of that name, not the football club). But there may be an another comparison, more recent and much closer.
Why is the UK so desperately underperforming? Why is the state of its mental health so very poor, when compared to other countries? Why have peoples hopes and expectations stagnated? Why is the health service so bad? Housing so squalid and insecure for so many? Especially as all the terrible social and economic problems were tackled so ably, especially in the years between 1945 and 1975? One intriguing set of ideas has been presented by George Monbiot. [1] [2] Intriguing because they link together so many disparate observations. Refreshing, because they challenge existing orthodoxies of Right and Left. For George, the culprit is Neoliberalism, which he defines as a cultish ideology based on a relentless cutting of the state, privatisation, low taxes and the freest possible flows of taxes and people. (the latter certainly explains why we couldn’t see the pictures in the Uffizi galleries in Florence)
Of course, it’s a contribution, not a panacea. But it touches on the same sort of themes as Thomas Piketty, Wilkinson and Pickett, Hutton and others whom we have referenced on these pages from time to time. That the endless competition by individuals for wealth and status will end up by leaving all of us poorer. Except the very rich, who own all the media by which we are told what a great idea all of this is. And as for the UK and poor old Manchester United? Perhaps both of them need to take a very long, cool look at the fundamental causes of their unhappy states. Before worse happens.
We always like intriguing new stories about health and biology here. That’s why we’ve showcased this item from Peter Hess of the Mail,Do you have Social Anxiety? Scientists Find the Condition lives in your gut. Peter reports some results from University College, Cork. Essentially, scientists there have transferred gut material from people with Social Anxiety to mice. And found that they have thereby induced significant changes in the nervous systems of those creatures: specifically, making them more prone to anxiety and fear [1]
The work is undoubtedly interesting, and it’s good journalism to write it up Especially when it’s one of our old tropes, in this case the relationship between the the digestive system and the nervous system (LSS 9 3 23 and passim). Is it the answer to all our woes? It’s too early to say.
Essentially, journalists report two types of science story. Definitive ones, which answer all the questions and close the subject down. Or intriguing ones on early research which opens a subject up and sets the questions for future researchers. It’s our gut feeling that this work belongs in the second category. For one thing, the numbers are small (12 people and 72 mice, if our maths is anywhere near correct) Good start, but we’d like to see replication across much larger numbers. And what is Social Anxiety Disorder anyhow? Psychiatric conditions are notoriously hard to define exactly. Could there be other causes of anxiety, such as war service or growing up with violent parents? They need to be controlled for.
It’s good work in an intriguing area, and we hope these researchers are given more time and money to pursue it. But we still wait and see for definitive conclusions.
We have two stories today, which if taken together, nicely illustrate the difference between Scientific Reason and Blind Faith.
CAR-T Therapy against Multiple sclerosis When we were young , Multiple Sclerosis was a dread disease, Slowly , understanding and therapies have evolved, and now as Nature Briefings explains, a powerful new method using the exciting new CAR-T system looks almost ready for large trials.
And we know how they did it The researchers looked at evidence. They designed and ran experiments . They discarded theories that the evidence showed was wrong. And eventually they came up with this, Engineered Cells for Multiple Sclerosis
The first US trials of CAR T cells to treat multiple sclerosis (MS) have started. These engineered cells could reset the malfunctioning immune system, halting the brain damage that defines MS. “I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but there’s a prospect here for a one-and-done therapy,” says neurologist Jeffrey Dunn, who is running a trial for Kyverna, a US biotech company. Safety is a concern because CAR T treatments can cause brain toxicity, which can result in confusion, seizures and death.Nature | 5 min read
Alabama Theocracy Over in the USA, the Faith-Based Folks of the Alabama Supreme Court have just outlawed IVF. You can read the full story from Robert Reich here [1] but a little of their motivation may be gleaned from the following
In a concurring opinion in last week’s Alabama supreme court decision, Alabama’s chief justice, Tom Parker, invoked the prophet Jeremiah, Genesis and the writings of 16th- and 17th-century theologians.
Today IVF….tomorrow.? Slowly, the tentacles of the Theocrats will close around every laboratory in the USA, banning this, forbidding that, until the US slips so far behind it can never catch up. It was by the Seventeenth Century trial of Galileo that the Catholic Church ensured its own eclipse by ensuring that thinkers fled to the Protestant lands of the north. Hitler found the same, ensuring that the best Jewish scientists fled to Allied countries, delivering their brains to his eventual defeat. That’s what happens when you discard evidence which the theory says is wrong.
Someone once observed that Knowledge and Belief are two different things. It can be hard to choose, we know. But if you need a little help, it may be worth looking at the outcomes of your choice. We can’t see the supreme court of Alabama coming up with a cure for disease any time soon. Nor will the Ayatollahs of Iran. But we hope the above evidence may help you, gentle reader, to support those who might.
Of course it’s terrible when a family hears the dread news that Alzheimer’s disease, or dementia, has started to afflict one of their members. But until today, when we spoke with a most educated young woman from Alzheimer’s Research UK, we thought it was a disease of the elderly. We had no idea that it can affect relatively young people, that is to say, in their thirties or forties.
But it can and does, as our links for you make abundantly clear. [1] [2]. We apologise for using UK statistics, but Alzheimers UK estimate that there are 70, 800 cases of one of the various dementias in people who are under 65. You can scale that up or down according to the size of your own country with a simple calculator app (UK population 2024=67.33 million) Meanwhile, we invite you to browse the links, as you will be riding on the frontier of one of the great unresolved research questions of our time.
And what to take away from all this? Firstly, you never know when you will learn something unexpected. Especially when you have access to intelligent people. (If you can’t find any to hand right now, we hope this blog will go some way to ameliorating the deficit) Secondly, keep your brain alive. Puzzles, maths, learning a foreign language or even studying the rules of logic might help. Or at least stave the thing off, for a while [3]. So might keeping fit. And finally-if by some miracle we save the scientific method from the various fanatical culture warriors who are currently afflicting the globe, we might just one day find a method to find that no one ever has to live with it again.
Learning, Science and Society 