Eat This Newsletter 252: Truth
ETN 252: Truthy
Hello
People may not always tell the truth and governments may not be as smart as they think. So what else is new? Fruit and veg are cheaper than you think, that’s what.
Centenarians: fraud and forgetfulness
It is not at all clear to me why Saul Justin Newman’s research into human age records won an Ig Nobel award for demographics. The Ig Nobels seek to reward “research that makes people laugh … then think”. This year, work on plants that mimic the leaf-shape of plastic plants nearby, or how dead fish swim, or whether human hair swirls differently in northern and southern hemispheres certainly fits the bill. Newman’s research — Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud — raised a smile, I admit, but far more than that made me think; my main thought being “surely someone had already done all this”.
An interview with Newman sheds more light. He has long been interested in the places that have lately come to be known as “blue zones,” where the population seems to harbour more than its fair share of centenarians. And with a variety of analyses, he shows that most of the centenarians have either forgotten when they were born or, more likely, are actually dead. In Okinawa, for example:
There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.
And of course if your descendants don’t register your death, one reason may be so that they can continue to claim your pension.
According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 “living” pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.
Newman’s work undermines all the research that has been thrown at trying to understand human longevity by trying to understand foodways where humans seem to live longer, from the Mediterranean diet to Bulgarian yoghurt. Not surprisingly, mainstream longevity researchers have reacted badly to his work, and it must be admitted than the paper that won the Ig Nobel is still a preprint that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Will the Ig Nobel get his work the recognition it deserves?
I hope so. But even if not, at least the general public will laugh and think about it, even if the scientific community is still a bit prickly and defensive. If they don’t acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I’ll just get someone to pretend I’m still alive until that changes.
What are they thinking?
A couple of episodes ago Louise Gray almost persuaded me that it is OK to buy green beans air-freighted from Kenya because it helps build the Kenyan economy. Now, though, news from Kenya that the government there is effectively outlawing small-scale farming — not the kind that provides us with fresh beans, the kind that supplies ordinary Kenyans with fresh fruit and veg. Hard to believe, I know, and at the moment all I have to go on is a report at FarmBizAfrica, according to which a 55-page mandatory standard will require all farmers of any size to obtain an expensive licence and keep onerous records if they wish to sell any amount of produce.
Presented publicly as a food safety measure, the standard applies over 500 new rules for farmers that will cut off the supplies of over 90 per cent of the country’s locally consumed fruit and vegetables.
It would interesting to know just how the government came to decide on this course of action. Of course the industrial farms — many of them foreign owned — will be able to afford the licensing. But how can it possibly be a good idea to effectively banish small-scale farmers from the market?
Think of the adults
There are all kinds of good reasons for governments to invest in school meals for all children, but one that I had not seen before is to eliminate the burden of preparing a packed lunch every day.
A new study from Canada, where 9 out of 10 children do not get a school lunch, chronicles the burden on women. Although the sample is small, the mothers’ experiences ring true and may well be universal. The work is complex, and they feel themselves under scrutiny by other adults, including teachers, and their own children as “good” mothers providing a “good” lunch. The study authors summarised their work in The Conversation.
Canada has one of the poorest records among rich countries when it comes to feeding children at school.Provinces are revising their policies based on a $1 billion commitment to a new National School Food Program. Will this new research carry any weight with policy-makers? Probably not, but perhaps it should.
Taped Over
Have you heard the one about the woman — it is always a woman — who swallowed tapeworm eggs to lose weight? I know I have, often, and in various sources, so I am quite saddened to report that the story is a load of tosh. In a way it is all too believable, both the general framing and the specific details of pills that wriggled when left on a warm windowsill, so I must be grateful to Quackwriter for digging deep into the topic and writing about those notorious tapeworm diet pills.
It is an illuminating story, and perhaps not for the squeamish, that does its very best to get to the bottom of the myth. Maybe it was rooted in anti-worm medicines, nothing to do with weight loss. It got boosts from fiction of different kinds. The archives of the Food and Drug Administration, alas, provide no indication that tapeworm pills were ever actually offered for sale.
Meal Appeal May Appall
Strange but true story of how researchers at Vanderbilt University in Kentucky discovered that colourblind people are less likely to be picky eaters. It starts with the observation that some people are just naturally better at identifying faces, or birds, or cars, or even food. They are better at picking the odd one out in a series of photos of various dishes.
Some of the difference in food recognition is explained by how good people are at general recognition of objects, but some isn’t, and the researchers thought that maybe it was related to their attitude to food. It turned out that in general, people who don’t trust new foods or are picky about what they eat score poorly on food recognition. So neophobia is part of the explanation.
Other scientists, meanwhile, had shown that parts of the brain involved in the perception of colour also seem to be specialised in the recognition of food. At Vanderbilt, the researchers decided to redo their studies using monochrome rather than colour images of the foods. The differences held up. Some people were still better than others at recognising food. But removing the colour cues also removed the relationship with neophobia.
It was as if whatever advantage the adventurous eaters had gained over picky eaters was all dependent on color.
They proposed that food recognition involved two components. First, one that does not involve colour, which explains the similarity between the two sets of experiments. The second, which does depend on colour, connects to an emotional response to the food and explains the weaker recognition ability of neophobic people. And that led to an entirely new prediction: colourblind people (effectively men, who outnumber colourblind women by 16 to 1) would be less neophobic than people with full colour vision.
So it proved. The big question now is whether this discovery could help neophobe eaters overcome their pickiness, should they want to.
Fresh Finances
We hear a lot about how expensive it is to eat a nutritionally adequate diet, especially for the five portions of fruit and vegetables we are supposed to eat each day. Welcome, then, the latest analysis by the USDA’s Economic Research Service of the cost per cup equivalent of 155 fresh and processed fruits and vegetables. The US advises people to eat 2 cup equivalents of fruit and 2.5 cup equivalents of vegetables a day, which 80% and 90% fail to do. Is that because they’re expensive?
The vast majority of fruits (53/62) cost less than $1.49 per cup equivalent, with 30 less than $0.99. For vegetables, 73/93 are less than $0.99 a cup. Overall, then, the ERS concludes that it is not that difficult to eat the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables for less than $3 a day. It helpfully includes some sample combinations that meet the targets. What it does not say is how much it costs to eat the rest of the diet, or whether $3 a day is a lot or a little for people on a low or no income.
Fortunately, earlier work by some of the same researchers sheds light on that. They created 3000 virtual baskets that contained enough food for a four-person household for a week and that met fruit and vegetable recommendations. They then looked at the poorest households receiving maximum SNAP benefits, which “are enough for the household to obtain a nutritious and palatable diet without spending any of its own money on food if it approximately follows USDA’s Thrifty Food Plan”. If those households allocate 40% of the SNAP benefits to fruit and vegetables, then they can afford a nutritious diet. “However, if households spend less than that amount, the variety of products they can buy while still satisfying recommendations drops off quickly.” It is an interesting piece of work.
Take care
