Natural vs. Artificial Part 2: All-Natural Resources!

I was going to save this for the end of this series, but I think it's worth saying now -- even though I may seem to be critical of them, I don't think there's anything wrong with all-natural food/products/remedies! In fact, my point in this series (which I'll try to explain better in the next post) is that, in terms of what they are and what they do to you, there is no difference between "natural" biomolecules and "artificial" biomolecules. Neither is better, neither is worse. They are just all part of one large set of substances that have a huge range of good and bad effects (including very good effects and very bad effects) on biological life forms such as ourselves.

Again... natural remedies can be great! What is frustrating is when people (who are either misinformed or downright unscrupulous) present various "all-natural folk remedies" as (1) effective, if it has already been firmly established that they are not, (2) more effective than they actually are, (3) effective in cases where the patient has a serious health issue that requires true medical care, or (4) effective, when the remedy is actually itself dangerous. (For example, this article discusses several cases of injuries and deaths that have occurred due to the actions of naturopathic "doctors".)

So, what's the Average, non-med-school-educated Joe to do? Clearly he shouldn't run to the doctor for every minor ache, pain, or sniffle. Ideally, he'd want to be able to intelligently wade through the flood of natural-treatment claims and advertisements to find some simple, effective, affordable home remedies for what ails him. Are there any resources that provide evidence-based, scientifically-proven recommendations for supplements and remedies? I'm so glad you asked!


NATURAL-TREATMENT RESOURCES:

• If you prefer books over online resources, you should definitely check out the The Mayo Clinic Book of Home Remedies (just released, October 2010). Besides providing a description of each ailment and some great home treatments to try, it also explains when it's probably time to seek professional medical help. It provides solid recommendations on diet and exercise, favors treatments that are supported by published studies, and avoids "alternative" treatments that have been proven to be ineffective. 

• Naturaldatabase.com is hands-down the best, most professional "natural-remedy" website I've found, containing "unbiased, scientific clinical information on complementary, alternative, and integrative therapies." Although it is designed for health care professionals, and parts of the (massive) database are only accessible by subscription, the Clinical Management Series is an incredible (free!) resource. From ADHD and asthma to PMS and UTI's, you can find the most commonly used natural medicines for various conditions, how the medicines work, a natural medicine recommendation chart that compares effectiveness vs. safety, and a veritable deluge of links to relevant literature.

• Another fun online resource I've come across is an interactive graphic (at informationisbeautiful.net) summarizing the "scientific evidence for popular health supplements." Each bubble represents a supplement -- hover over the bubble to see the condition that it is used to treat. The nearer the bubble is to the top, the better the evidence for the effectiveness of that supplement for that condition. For example, fish oil is a fantastic treatment for high blood pressure, and cranberry really does help urinary tract infections. Even better, click the bubble to jump to a relevant key study. It's especially useful for comparing the evidence for different treatments for a specific ailment... for example if you use the pop-out menu to select arthritis, you see that your best bet is to start by trying devil's claw, rather than chrondroitin.

• Finally, personalhealthzone.com, though certainly not as thorough as the database at Naturaldatabase.com, seems to be a great free resource for finding side effects of a multitude of herbs, vitamins, and supplements. For example, that devil's claw that is recommended for arthritis should be avoided if you've got ulcers, or if taking warfarin, anticoagulant, or antiplatelet therapies. And check out the warnings on St. John's wort... 

So, by all means, try to take advantage of some simple remedies for your health issues, before scurrying off to the doctor's office! But be wary of your source... the internet gives us lots of information at our fingertips, but not all of it is good information. I think that the resources above are some good places to start looking.


Kudos to Amy R. and Dave W. for pointing out some of these sites!

We all see it on packages every day, from food to herbal supplements to beauty products: All-natural! Organic ingredients! No preservatives! No artificial flavors or colors! No chemical additives! The message, stated explicitly or just implied, is simple: Natural products are good for you; artificial chemicals are bad for you.

This is the standard line from proponents of naturopathy, herbal remedies, and all-natural supplements. For example, Chris Kilham, self-proclaimed "traditional, plant-based Medicine Hunter" says that “My goal is to have more people using safe, effective, proven, healthful herbs, and fewer people using toxic, overly expensive, marginally effective, potentially lethal pharmaceutical drugs.” Or there's this book: Natural Cures and Gentle Medicines That Work Better Than Dangerous Drugs or Risky Surgery. Or these folks, who ask "If you knew natural ingredients and natural remedies would solve your health problems and do it without harmful side effects.. Why would you ever want to use harmful drugs that have many negative side-effects?"

These are major, widely-held misconceptions... that "natural" substances are inherently good and "healthy," while "unnatural" substances are obviously "bad" and "unhealthy."

In this post, I just want to quickly tackle the concept that "natural things are obviously healthy" -- the idea that the "All Natural!" logo on your potato chip bag, or orange juice carton, or herbal supplement bottle obviously means "good!"



I think most people will admit, if they think about it for a moment, that just because something comes from "nature" doesn't mean it's going to automatically be healthy and wonderful. The natural world is absolutely FULL of "natural" ingredients that will kill you or at least ruin your day: cyanide, strychnine, arsenic, hemlock, cocaine, opium, most mushrooms, "poison" oak/ivy... Even plants we regularly cultivate for food are chock-full of toxic poisons: the foliage from tomatoes and potatoes, the berries of asparagus, the leaves of rhubarb, the seeds of apples. And all those examples were just a sampling of poisonous vegetation -- we're not even getting into the "all-natural" poisons found in animals or insects or microorganisms....

The temptation, then, is to think of natural substances in two distinct categories: harmful or helpful. Those that will poison you (cyanide, strychnine...), and those that make you healthy (vitamins or antioxidants, for example). But even this is a vast oversimplification of how things work in nature. Even essential nutrients like vitamins -- some of which we must consume to survive -- are toxic at the wrong levels, or to the wrong person at the wrong time.  Too much potassium leads to dangerous heart palpitations. Too much fiber can actually cause constipation and serious intestinal blockages, rather than relieve it. Overdosing on various vitamins can lead to nerve damage, liver failure, osteoporosis, skin problems, hair loss, dehydration, vomiting, birth defects... etc etc. (Here are some great resources for checking the side effects of many herbs, supplements, and vitamins.)

On the other hand, even the deadliest poisons can be helpful or life-saving, if given to the right person, at the right time, in just the right dose. Cyanide, for example, can be used to rapidly lower someone's blood pressure in an emergency medical situation. Strychnine (in tiny doses) was formerly used as a laxative and for other stomach ailments. Hemlock has been used as a sedative (though the line between the dose of hemlock that would induce "sedation" and one that would induce "death" is very narrow...).

My point in discussing all of these examples ad nauseum is this: "all-natural" substances can't be put into black and white categories! They are a million shades of grey, with varying good and bad effects depending on the body's needs at a given moment. In fact, our bodies are so massively complex, with intricately intertwined systems, that it's actually incredibly difficult for anything to be 100% bad or 100% good. Clearly, just because something is "all-natural" doesn't necessarily make it good for you! 


And that's why those "all-natural" labels drive me crazy. Sure, they're just an advertising gimmick. But they are a glimpse into the mindset of the average American shopper -- that those "all-natural" products somehow have an inherent advantage over the other products with their preservatives and "artificial chemicals."

In this post, I wanted to lay some basic groundwork by showing that all-natural doesn't mean all-good. Of course, you may still be thinking to yourself... ok, maybe all-natural substances aren't all good... but surely they're better than un-natural, man-made substances!  Next, I'll tackle this distinction between "natural" and "artificial"... how different are they, really? Check back for the answer. Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

Build-a-Baby: The Ethics of Scientific Progress

Science is controversial. Look no further than 2010's Nobel Prize in medicine for in-vitro fertilization, a long-controversial technology that is still condemned by the Vatican.

A post at Science Not Fiction raises a great question -- "Does Technology Help Us Be More Ethical?" Or are we growing less ethical as science opens up a world of new possibilities? I found one of the examples they brought up to be particularly intriguing....

Let’s imagine a new example: designer babies. We first hear about a brand new technology and everybody from religious leaders to scientific experts to your grandmother stands up and denounces it—“Yuck!” says Grandma; “Eugenics will bring back Hitler armies!” says the politician who has no grasp of science (a redundant statement, I know); “God doesn’t approve!” says the Vatican; “all people will all be the same!” says the worried science philosopher. “The genetic engineering of people could have lots of things go wrong with it, and it’s just unnatural, so we probably shouldn’t do it,” says the general consensus.

The prospect of "designer babies" is definitely not far off. Certainly it comes with a host of potentially unethical applications -- selecting babies on the basis of height, hair color, or even intelligence, as demonstrated fantastically by the movie Gattaca (often cited as one of the most accurate portrayals of science by Hollywood). But what about the vast array of genetic disorders we couldprevent using "designer-baby" technology? Cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sach's, diabetes, heart disease, sickle-cell anemia, some cancers (including breast and colon), severe alcoholism, Huntington's, some forms of Alzheimer's, obesity, ALS, Turner's -- all these, and hundreds more, are sometimes or always caused by genetic factors, and therefore theoretically preventable.

So, if (not yet, but soon) we have it in our power to safely prevent these diseases, are we morally obligated to? As the SNF post puts it:

In a world where one can easily prevent a litany of genetic diseases and disorders, how would you look back on a society that paid no attention to the genetic health of the child? Would you consider it moral to leave a child’s genetic outlook to chance? 

God Particles on the Brain

The "God Particle" has popped back up in the news lately, and as a result it's come up in conversation with increasing freqency... "Why are scientists spending billions so they can smash a few atoms together?" "Are they going to 'disprove' God?" "What if they accidentally DESTROY the EARTH???"

So, here are my responses (in regular-person, non-scientist English!) to the two most common questions I've gotten... (1) What the heck is it, and (2) Whaddya mean it's the "God" particle?

(1) "What on earth is a Higgs Boson, and why do we care about it???"

Everything around you is made of matter.... rocks, water, air, toothpaste, yesterday's leftovers, everything. All matter is made of molecules, and all molecules are made of atoms -- carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, silicon, the whole list from the periodic table. But... what are atoms made of? Scientists have figured out they're put together from a bunch of "elementary particles", some of which you may (or may not) have heard of. Electrons, neutrinos, photons, six kinds of quarks (up quark, down quark, strange quark...), muons, gluons, etc etc -- 12 particles in all. We know a lot about these particles -- their charges, how they "spin", how they behave.

One thing is odd, though... they all have very different masses*. Photons (what light is made of) don't have mass at all. Electrons have a tiny bit of mass. Quarks can be huuuugely massive (relatively speaking) -- hundreds of thousands of times heavier than the electron. What exactly determines how much those guys weigh??? There are a few "models" that theoretical physicists (the ones who sit around doing tons of really hard math) and research physicists (the ones who build huge machines to smash atoms together) have developed to explain what we know about these particles -- including their masses.

The theory that seems to explain our observations the best, the "Standard Model" (since most physicists think it is true), predicts that in addition to the 12 elementary particles we've directly identified, there is one more -- the Higgs boson. This Standard Model says that all 12 of the elementary particles we've observed are actually massless -- they have NO weight at all, just like photons. Instead, elementary particles that DO have weight get it by interacting with the Higgs boson -- or, specifically, a "field" generated by the Higgs boson. Think of this Higgs field like a thick molasses that permeates the universe, and "sticks" to particles moving through it. Some stick more, some less, some slide through without sticking at all... but the more those particles stick, the "heavier" they seem to us Earthlings, as we study them.

So ANYWAY, this hypothetical Higgs boson makes all the math work out just right, so that the Standard Model very accurately predicts the way we see all of those elementary particles behaving. (In fact, the Standard Model, finalized in the 1970's, actually predicted the existence of particles that we didn't actually see until the last decade or so, once we had built atom-smashers big enough to detect them.) For at least 40 years, the Standard Model has stood the test of time -- so far. There's just one more particle left to find... the Higgs Boson.**

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (or its little brother, the Fermilab Tevatron) are hoping to smash atoms together hard enough that the Higgs boson pops out -- probably for less than a "septillionth" of a second. That's NOT very long. But it would be long enough to catch a glimpse of the little guy, and provide even more evidence that the Standard Model is right after all. This has physicists very excited -- in their own words, every time they switch on their atom-smasher, they feel like "a bunch of kids on Christmas morning," ready to rip open the biggest present ever.

(2) "So WHY is everyone calling it the 'God Particle'?"

The idea is that the Higgs boson is a lot like God.... We can't see it, but (if it exists) it's literally EVERYWHERE -- all around us, inside us, permeating the universe. It's not that it actually has anything to do with God, or spirituality, or the supernatural, or anything like that -- it's just a catchy name that grabs people's attention (which is why the media -- and the movie "Angels and Demons" -- love it so much).

Although the term is popular in the media, most scientists actually are NOT fans of calling the Higgs boson the God particle... they realize that it grabs people's attention for totally erroneous reasons. (The Public: "WHAT? Science is trying to discover/disprove/explain GOD!??!?" The Media: "Well, no, not really. But we sure got your attention, eh?") Public controversy aside, most scientists also think the term overstates the importance of the Higgs boson, when really it's just 1 out of the 13 elementary particles. They actually held a re-naming competition to celebrate the 80th birthday of Dr. Peter Higgs (who first proposed the particle). The winning entry was the "Champagne Bottle Particle", which just goes to show you that sometimes scientists are pretty clueless when it comes to thinking up catchy names.

[Speaking of lousy nicknames, my first thought was to refer to it as the Kenobi Particle... ("It surrounds us, and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together...." -- Obi-wan Kenobi) Some physicists also joke that the term is short for the God-d*** Particle, because of how difficult it is to detect....]

Some people have been making a big deal out of the fact that the Higgs boson "creates mass" or "creates something from nothing".... isn't that God's department??? Does the Higgs boson "disprove" or "explain away" God? Well, no. The Higgs boson doesn't "create" mass... it IS mass (if the Standard Model is right), just like light IS photons. Getting closer to a fundamental understanding of what light (or mass) is doesn't tell us anything about how either of them initially got here (two of the most common options being "spontaneously" and "God created them".)

Rock it, Science! Rock it good!!!

--Dianoguy

* If the term "mass" confuses you, just mentally substitute "weight" in whenever you see mass. They're not exactly the same, but close enough for our purposes.

**As good as the Standard Model is, there are other, competing theories that explain the behavior of the particles that we can see without the need for a Higgs boson. These "Higgsless Models" and the Standard Model make slightly different predictions about what we'd see when we smash atoms together. So, that's one major thing physicists do... set up experiments that would give specific results, results that would match up better with one theory much better than any of the others. Finding the Higgs boson is a perfect example of this.... the Standard Model says we'll find it under specific conditions, the Higgsless Models say we won't. Who's right? Only time (and massive atom-smashers) will tell...

Flying Frogs and Nobel Prizes

I love Nobel Prize week -- it's like the World Series of Science. Every day this week (plus next Monday) the Nobel Foundation announces this year's winners in each of the six categories: Physiology/Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace, and (tacked on in 1968) Economics.

This year, the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their work with graphene. But Geim is already the winner of a major prize... anIG-Nobel Prize, in 2000. The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that "first make people laugh -- and then make them think." His Ig-Nobel-worthy research involved levitating frogs (Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons) using nothing more than magnets:

This is utterly harmless to the frog (and, fascinatingly, there's no reason it shouldn't work for humans...) It's based on the concept of diamagnetic levitation -- aka, "maglev" -- and is the operating principle behind maglev trains.

Of course, his Nobel prize wasn't for levitating frogs... it was for "groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene," seen at right. Graphene is simply a two-dimensional lattice of carbon atoms -- essentially a sheet of chicken wire that's just one atom thick.

People had known about graphene for years, but one of Geim's great achievements was figuring out how to actually make it, so it could be studied. His production technique has to be one of the most low-tech methods to ever win someone a Nobel Prize -- it involved pencil lead ("graphite"), Scotch tape... and that's all. In fact, his prize-winning graphene was literally fished from the trash. Says Geim:

"We had been trying several other methods [of isolating graphene] in our lab. And there was a senior researcher who was preparing samples of graphite (bulk carbon samples) for the attempts. The way you clean graphite is just cover it with tape and pull the tape off, and then throw it away. So once, I just picked it up out of the trash and we analyzed it."

Bingo. Graphene galore. (Video of the technique here. I'm picturing slow, wonky tuba/accordion music playing in the background...)

So, what makes graphene so great? Well, for starters, it's the thinnest material in the world... as you might have expected, since it's only an atom thick. It's also the strongest material ever tested, (much like 3D lattices of carbon -- ie, diamonds -- are the hardest). According to two Columbia University researchers (Kysar and Hone), if a sheet of graphene were stretched over a coffee cup, it could withstand the poke of a pencil point that's pushing down with weight of a truck. If you could balance a truck on a pencil, of course.

Another of its physical properties is especially interesting to scientists -- it's the best conductor of electricity at room temperature that we've ever found. This makes it attractive to developers of transistors and computer chips as a potential replacement for silicon in the next generation of ultra-fast computer hardware. Plus, it's practically transparent, making it a good candidate for use in strong-but-flexible touchscreens.


So, back to Nobel Prize week. Today, in Physics, it was the popularizer of graphene (and levitator of frogs). Yesterday in Medicine, it was the inventor of in-vitro fertilization. Tomorrow, in Chemistry... will it be Whitesides or Lieber, with Team Nanotech? Brown, with his unstoppable DNA Microarray? Will the Japanese team take the gold with their organometallic sponges? Tune in tomorrow (atnobelprize.org) for the results of this winner-take-all showdown!!!

Hey look... it's art!

In response to an artist friend's return to blogging, I've posted my own attempt at abstract art:



Actually, no, I lied. It's not art... it's SCIENCE!!! It's actually yesterday's lab results from my research project in grad school. My feeble attempts at art are strictly limited to music and photography. And, really, I think I approach even those genres from much more of an "analytical" perspective than an artistic one....

[Edit, 2/7/10 -- looks like I'm not the only one to equate DNA with art!]

Medical Anomolies

I saw this clip on YouTube a few months ago about the "Tree Man of Java" (superpowers sold separately):

For those with slow connections (or for those who need motivation to wait for the video to load), here's a shot of his "hands":


I ran into a recent article about his condition (a random combination of the HPV virus plus an incredibly rare genetic immune disorder) and the treatment he's been getting... which led me to an article on the man without a face....



....which, in turn, led to an article about a girl with two faces....


...which, of course, pointed me to an article about an 11-pound, 23-inch-tall 15-year-old. Here, she's pictured with a 13-month old, and her classmates:


It's interesting to note the role of religion in some of these stories. The guy with the facial tumor has firmly refused medical treatment until recently, since (until recently) the medical procedures involved would have required a blood transfusion, something he won't consider as a staunch Jehovah's Witness. Meanwhile, the girl is being hailed as a reincarnation of the Hindu god Ganesha. Her parents certainly don't mind... everyone who comes to pay their respects to the baby include a nice monetary gift.