Fire and Knowledge

If every youth and man, from fifteen to fifty years old, could wield an axe two hours per day, dyspepsia would vanish from the earth, and rheumatism become decidedly scarce.

–Horace Greeley, Reflections of a Busy Life (1868) as quoted in Scott and Helen Nearing, The Good Life, p. 305

When someone drives up to the farm in a BMW and asks me why our eggs cost more, … well, first I try not to get mad. Frankly, any city person who doesn’t think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn’t deserve my special food. Let them eat E. coli. But I don’t say that. Instead, I take him outside and point at his car. ‘Sir, you clearly understand quality and are willing to pay for it. Well, food is no different: You get what you pay for.’

–Joel Salatin in Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 244

The placebo response is about far more than the pills - it is about the cultural meaning of a treatment, our expectation, and more. So we know that four sugar pills a day will clear up ulcers quicker than two sugar pills, we know that a saltwater injection is a more effective treatment for pain than a sugar pill, we know that green sugar pills are more effective for anxiety than red, and we know that brand packaging on painkillers increases pain relief.

–Ben Goldacre, “The end of homeopathy?“

Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?

–Joel Salatin in Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 240

Almost as soon as [HIV] starts multiplying, our immune system starts recognizing the infected white blood cells and destroying them, wiping out the viruses in the process. But despite the immune system’s ability to kill HIV by the billions every day, HIV can survive these attacks for years. The secret to its longevity is its ability to evolve. The enzymes that HIV uses to make new copies of its genes are very sloppy, making one or two mistakes on average every time they duplicate the virus’s genome. Among the many mutants that spring up, a few strains will turn out to be hard for the immune system to recognize. Because HIV replicates so quickly, these resistant viruses quickly become the dominate strains in a person’s body. It takes time for our immune system to shift its attack toward the new strain, and once it does, the viruses evolve even newer forms that escape the immune system yet again.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 218

The greatest possibility of evil in self-medication is the use of too-small doses, so that, instead of clearing up the infection, the microbes are educated to resist penicillin and a host of penicillin-fast organisms is bred out which can be passed on to other individuals and perhaps from there to others until they reach someone who … penicillin cannot save.

In such a case the thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of the man who finally succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism. I hope this evil can be averted.

–Sir Alexander Fleming (1881–1955), the discoverer of penicillin. Quoted in Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 215

I spent a lot of time looking at the science of nutrition, and learned pretty quickly there’s less there than meets the eye, and that the scientists really haven’t figured out that much about food. Letting them tell us how to eat is probably not a very good idea, and indeed the culture — which is to say tradition and our ancestors — has more to teach us about how to eat well than science does.

–Michael Pollan in “A Conversation with Michael Pollan,” Grist Magazine.

I found the op-ed “Nice Shot” by Jessica Snyder Sachs very informative. But I still don’t plan on getting a flu shot. Excerpt:

In 1989, an epidemiologist in Britain, David Strachan, observed that babies born into households with lots of siblings were less likely than other babies to develop allergies and asthma. The same proved true of babies who spent significant time in day care. Dr. Strachan hypothesized that the protection came from experiencing an abundance of childhood illnesses.

Dr. Strachan’s original hygiene hypothesis got a lot of press, not only in the news media but in serious medical journals. Less publicized was the decade-long string of follow-up studies that disproved a link between illnesses and protection from inflammatory disorders like allergies and asthma. If anything, studies showed, early illness made matters worse.

Moreover, studies now show that the more infections a person has during childhood, the greater his or her chance of premature death from scourges of old age like heart disease and cancer. The link appears to be chronic inflammation, a kind of lingering collateral damage from the body’s disease-fighting response.

Still, Dr. Strachan’s original observation was confirmed — as a group, babies in large families and day care are less likely to develop allergies and asthma than are children born into smaller families and kept at home. The same protective effect can be seen in children born on farms and in areas without public sanitation.

But the link isn’t disease-causing germs. It’s early and ample exposure to harmless bacteria — especially the kinds encountered living close to the land and around livestock and other young children. In other words, dirt, dung and diapers. Just as disease-causing microbes clearly bring on inflammation, harmless microorganisms appear to exert a calming effect on the immune system.