The Stock Market and Antioxidants

Two interesting things happened in the last 24 hours.

Well, actually, thousands of interesting things happened in the last 24 hours, but I'm going to focus on two.

The stock market had a mini crash- the Dow dropped 416 points, triggering panics everywhere. And a new study came out claiming that antioxidant supplements not only don't help anyone, but that they actually increase the risk of death.

The two events are not unrelated. And both say say far more about human behavior than they do about their respective subjects. Let me explain.

Let's start with the stock market.

Anyone who knows anything at all about investing knows that the stock market goes up and down and has all sorts of corrections, but, over time, without fail, over any time period longer than ten years, it shows a remarkable, consistent, predictable gain of about 10 percent (actually, a very real 6.8% above the 3% allowed for inflation, but who's counting)? Unfailingly. Even allowing for the crash of 1987.

No matter how you massage the data, the stock market goes up over time. Period. Done. While there are temporary fluctuations- which can seem scary when you're in the middle of them- the long term direction is unfailingly positive.

Therefore it's in an investor's rational interest to stay put when this stuff happens. But people don't behave rationally. They run out and sell, triggering all kinds of insane market behavior which is what happened yesterday. Meanwhile, smarter investors are laughing and saying, "hey, stocks are on sale! Woo-hah!"

Which brings me to antioxidants.

Yesterday's "study"- which is not a study but yet another very badly done 'meta-analysis'- looks at dozens of other studies and tries to draw some conclusions. Some of the studies included in this meta-analysis was the god-awful beta-carotene study in which they tested a bad, synthetic beta-carotene in a population of people who had been smoking 30 years and/or had been exposed to asbestos. Other of the studies included didn't control for type of antioxidant, baseline levels in the population, or dozens of other variables. It's unlikely most of these studies would pass muster if they were examined individually for methodology, but they were 'included' in the meta-analysis because they were available and because most people doing these studies aren't even aware of what questions to ask about the quality of the data, so they just go ahead and study whatever numbers are available.

For example, that recent "meta-analysis" that concluded that vitamin E doesn't do anything and may even increase the risk of death when taken over 150IU's looked at a dozen or so studies- none of which had shown any such thing- and then applied an almost never-used statistical method called a "quadratic-linearspline analysis" which is biased toward harm and almost never done in a meta-analysis, and came up with the prepostorous statement that vitamin E may increase the risk of death. This is like manipulating data to come up with the conclusion that water doesn't put out fire. (I have no doubt that with clever use of statistics, you could prove that statement as well). Sales of vitamin E supplements plummeted 40% after that one.

So here's the point.

Dozens and dozens of studies show what antioxidants do in the lab, in cells, in systems. Most studies of single nutrients in large populations are absolutely terrible and show very little. Some of this is connect-the-dots: give a rat cancer and he grows less tumors when exposed to substance A, it's probably a good thing to get substance A in the diet.

The problem with antioxidants isn't that they cause increased risk of death, which is such a preposterous statement I almost feel silly refuting it.

The problem is the incredible difficulty of doing well-controlled studies of single antioxidant supplements, and the ultimate uselessness of doing them in the first place, since most work in concert with one another, and may not perform particularly well in study designs that were originally meant to show the effect of pharmaceutical drugs on specific symptoms and conditions. That's not how antioxidants work.

On bulletin boards like the Vanguard Diehards board, where investors just shrug off these little "turbulences" in the market and tend to have a long-view, buy-and-hold strategy, there was much talk of the "crash" today. Most of it was on the order of this: "Woo-hah! Stocks are on sale! Let's buy more".

The stock market isn't crashing. It had a temporary drop and everyone panicked.

Antioxidants are going to continue to protect the body's cells and systems against oxidation and DNA damage, and hopefully one day we'll have better research to show exactly how they work.

In the meantime, you'll have to excuse me. I have to go take my vitamins with my fresh vegetable juice and raw eggs, after which I'm going to put some money in the market.

Stocks are on sale.

Television and Autism: What do they tell us about food?

Michael Waldman s 2 year old son David was identified as having Autistic Spectrum Disorder back in 2003.

So he did what many parents would do and have done. He looked for things he could do to make things better.

Of course, he did all the recommended therapies, but he also did something else.

He had noticed that his kid had started watching an awful lot of television right after his baby sister was born, coincidentally in the summer before he was diagnosed.

Coincidentally?

Michael Waldman didn t know. But in the absence of any randomized controlled studies on autism and television watching (more on that in a minute), he made an educated guess of the cant hurt might help variety. He curtailed the kids TV watching.

And he says, according to the Wall Street Journal, which chronicled this story today, that his son improved within six months and is fully recovered today.

Michael Waldman also happens to be a renown professor of economics.

So he decided to investigate the association between television watching and autism using traditional economic research tools, something that is considered a bit of a stretch in research circles, but seems to be coming more prevalent ever since the phenomenal success of Freakonomics by the brilliant rogue economist Steven Levitt, who used his economist s research tool-box on such things as the behavior of real estate agents.

Now understand that you cant really do a study where you take a group of kids who are susceptible to autism and divide them in half and expose on half to a ton of television and the other half to none and see which ones do better. For one thing it s unethical and for another even if it weren t unethical its impossible. So Waldman used other statistical methods of data analysis to arrive at his conclusion, which was this: Kids who watch a lot more television have higher rates of autism.

Now just hold on, I can hear you saying. Thats a real stretch. For one thing, even if there is a correlation, how do we know that kids with autism arent more drawn to television? Problem with any correlation study is that it works both ways- the TV watching could cause autism, but autistic kids could also be more prone to watch in the first place. Also, if television caused autism, every kid in America would have the disorder.

But Waldman isnt saying television causes autism.

What he is suggesting- as a future topic of research- is that perhaps, in susceptible individuals, excessive television watching could act as a trigger for a disorder.

Ive been thinking about this a lot as I work on my new book (The REAL Natural Cures Book, due in Jan. 2008). Why, you ask? Because in at least a half dozen disorders that Ive investigated so far, food and environmental stimuli can trigger severe symptoms of a disorder. In some cases, they could be said to actually cause it; in most they could be said to aggrevate it. In many, when you remove the triggers, the symptoms clear up.

Not in all cases, to be sure. But in many. And in others, even if there isn't total remission, theres major improvement.

But its fiendishly difficult to say the trigger “ causes ” the illness, which is why conventional docs, who tend to think in terms of black and white evidence- dismiss all of us who use diet and supplements as a treatment modality as nuts.

But heres the thing.

In a big subset of asthma sufferers, trigger foods will bring on symptoms. Same with IBS. And of ADHD, Dr. Daniel Amen told me that he estimates that fully 30 percent of kids diagnosed with ADHD could be literally cured with diet and lifestyle changes. And Ive long suspected that the great difficulty in finding proof of a connection between mercury vaccines and autism is because there is a subset of kids who cant detox the mercury and its those kids that are susceptible. Not all kids. Just those kids. Not enough to prove a perfect cause, but pretty significant if you happen to be the parent of one of those susceptible kids.

So heres the deal. Nature doesn t compete with nurture to produce behaviors or illness- they work together. What happens in the environment- food, supplements, lifestyle, stress, you name it- is always important, but in certain susceptible people its even more important. So some kids have the necessary liver enzymes to detox a small amount of mercury in a vaccine, but maybe some kids just dont. Not having that enzyme won t change the quality of their life one bit- unless they re exposed to mercury. Same deal applies- on a smaller level perhaps- to wheat, dairy, food dyes, stress, you name it and a host of conditions ranging from asthma to ADHD to IBS.

So Waldmans work on television and autism is of more than passing interest.

But the take-home isn’t that television causes autism. (It doesn't. At least not in the traditional sense of cause.)

The take-home is that nature and nurture interact in a ton of varied and complicated ways and the result- whether it be asthma or autism- is rarely if ever just genetic or just environmental.

And while we’re waiting for studies- some of which will probably never be done- we should never stop looking.

And observing.

And learning from both.

New over the counter weight loss pill! Hold me back!

So guess what. There's a new over-the-counter weight loss pill just approved by the FDA.

If you thought deconstructing the commercials on Superbowl Sunday was a fun time, wait till you see the ads that are sure to be coming for this one.

It's called Alli, it's made by GlaxoSmithKline, and it should be coming to your neighborhood drugstore by this summer.

Alli is actually Orlistat, which is actually Xenical. Xenical has been around for a while, didn't work very well, and is now being given a face lift; it's being taken off prescription-only status and showing up in nice new packaging as Alli.

This is not the first time the clever marketers at Big Pharma have done this. Not too long ago, Eli Lilly took Prozac, dressed it up in nice pink and purple colors and rechristened it "Sarafem" for PMS.

But I digress.

So what do we know about Xenical (oh, excuse, me, Alli)..

It's a member of a category of weight loss drugs that might be called "digestive inhibitors". It blocks some of the fat that you eat from being digested and assimilated, and it does this by blocking the digestive enzyme lipase- which breaks down fat. The result? As much as 30 percent of the fat you eat doesn't go to your hips. Questions, anyone?

How 'bout this one: "What does it do to the fat that's already ON your hips?"

Answer: Zip-i-dee-doo-dah.

People lose weight on Xenical- 'scuse me, Alli- because it essentially lowers caloric intake automatically. If you, for example, were eating a nice hefty 2500 calories a day and 30 percent of them happened to come from fat, you would normally be taking in 750 fat calories. By taking Xenical with a fatty meal, about one third of those fat calories aren't absorbed, so the 750 calories becomes, theoretically, 500 calories. You've "saved" 250 calories while eating the same meal (note the operative word theoretically). Stick to that plan for a week and you've "saved" 250 times 7 calories or a grand total of 1750 calories or... let's see... ummm... one half pound?

Yup.

And that's theoretically.

The first big study to put Xenical on the map was a two-year European study which showed that patients on Xenical lost between 2 and 3 percent more weight than those on a placebo. A second two year European trial put obese patients on a reduced-calorie diet and gave them 120 mg of Xenical 3 times a day. At the end of the year they had lost about 9 pounds more than the placebo group. Read that carefully. Nine pounds a year which translates to 3/4 pound a month.
A similar study in the US produced 1/2 pound per month for Xenical users.

So is Alli the answer? Hardly. Unless maybe if you're a stockholder in Glaxo.

Can it help if you're already doing all the right stuff, like eating well, eating clean, exercising, and taking care of yourself in a profoundly nurturing way? Maybe so. Maybe it can add a little tiny extra that could be meaningful to some people.

But unless you use it in conjunction with all that other good stuff- that so many people seem to want to bypass- it's just not going to do diddly squat.

But look on the bright side- all that "good stuff" is what makes life a challenge. And makes it fun.

And makes it mean so much when you lose the weight the old fashioned way. By following the three simple maxims stated recently by Michael Pollan in his brilliant article in the Sunday New York Times, and endorsed, wholeheartedly and completely, by yours truly:

Eat (real) food.

Not so much.

Mostly plants.