Coffee Break: Longevity, Quackitude, a Supplement that Works, and a Short Meditation on Orthodoxy

Part the First: What the Longevity Bros Miss: The Office of Science and Society (OSS) at McGill University is one of the best newsletters of its kind and has provided much to think about today’s Coffee Break.  In this first part, it is not too difficult to understand the desire to live long and prosper.  Going back several millennia that have included an afterlife in many imaginaries, it is still true that “Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die to get there.”  Should We Be Reaching for that Greek Cup of Coffee has some good advice for all of us:

According to Greek mythology, Icarus tried to soar like a bird with wings he had fabricated out of feathers. Unfortunately, he plunged into the sea after the wax with which he had attached the wings melted when he flew too close to the sun. The Greek Island of Ikaria was named after Icarus and has become a focus for longevity researchers because along with Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, the Nicoya peninsula in Costa Rica and Loma Linda in California it boasts unusually high rates of longevity. And unlike places like the Hunza Valley of Pakistan that claim extreme longevity, the inhabitants of these areas have birth certificates that prove their age. On Ikaria, ten times as many people live to the age of 90 as in the rest of Europe. They have lower rates of heart disease and cancer, suffer less from depression and dementia and apparently maintain an active sex life into old age. The question is, what are they doing right?

A factor in their longevity may be the Greek coffee they drink. In one study, scientists used ultrasound to study the response of arteries in the arm to changes in blood flow as they applied and then released pressure through a cuff on the arm. The ability of arteries to dilate quickly after being constricted is a measure of the health of the artery and a determinant of cardiovascular risk. Because of contradictory studies on the links between coffee consumption and heart disease over the years, University of Athens cardiologist Dr. Gerasimos Siasos thought that assessing the coffee consumption and arterial health of senior Ikarians could prove to be fruitful. In a sample of 71 male and 71 female subjects over the age of 65, Dr. Siasos found that chronic Greek coffee consumption was associated with improved endothelial function.

The scientific paper was published in 2013, so this is not new.  As far as it goes, the hypothesis is reasonable.  Compromised endothelial function is the cause of much morbidity and mortality.  But a group of 142 subjects is not large, and the paper has been cited only twelve times in as many years.  Still, Joe Schwarcz, the author of the OSS piece, surely gets it right.  It’s not the coffee.  It’s the life, of which the coffee is only one part.  The other parts are diet, exercise, and sleep in the form of an afternoon nap, plus the prospect of right livelihood, which is the greatest stress reliever of all.  The latter is most important and this is what the tech bros in their monumental self-regard miss.  They also fail to understand that good health can be subject to stochastic processes, which has been learned the hard way by that notable seeker of immortality, Bryan Johnson:

What appears to link all the places in the world where unusual longevity has been documented is a mostly plant-based diet and social structure. It is easy to take naps, eat vegetables and dance at festivals when everyone else does the same thing.

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The bottom line here? Remember that the study we talked about only measured epithelial function. The assumption is that improved function leads to greater longevity. But the researchers did not determine if the subjects with better epithelial function actually lived longer. In any case, I think we can safely assume that substituting Greek coffee for your morning Starbucks is not going to increase your life expectancy. Substituting an Ikarian type of lifestyle for our western one, might.

When reading a scientific paper one should always look for the unstated assumptions, particularly when human health is the subject.  In my current life several colleagues and I are trying to rescue the science and art of human nutrition, i.e., eating and the good life, from the dreary science of nutritionism, which is a holdover from the heroic age of biochemistry that included the discovery of vitamins and the determination of minimal dietary requirements for protein.  Medical nutrition for patients in care is another matter altogether.

In my view, the problem with the current approach is that something called the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) got there first.  Their work is useful at the margin and they are earnest, but “lifestyle” implies choice while at the same time reeking of MAHA World.  Most of the malnourished, but often overweight, among us are not so because of their choices.  I’m reminded of the HERBLOCK cartoon (I do have a thing for editorial cartoons, The Far Side, Doonesbury, Pogo, and Calvin and Hobbes) from February of 1984 in which either Ronald Reagan or Ed Meese comments from the presidential limousine as they pass by two cold, homeless men sleeping on sidewalk ventilation grates in Washington, DC, while another in stocking cap and ragged coat and gloves eats soup from a small cup: “Strange How Some Choose to Live Like that Instead of Choosing to Be Rich Like Us.”  Indeed.

Of course, in our current MAGA World, homelessness (now euphemized as “unhoused”) is a choice.  Anyway, the American College of Culinary Medicine seems to be on the same wavelength as the ACLM.  Culinary?  Seriously?  Teaching a single mother who lives in a food desert, or more likely a food swamp, why her culinary choice of saffron wild salmon with polenta and haricots verts is good for her and her children doesn’t really seem like the way to go.  On the other hand, an accessible market where she could buy real stone-ground grits (not “instant”) along with butter, salt, and pepper, plus frozen farmed catfish and fresh or frozen green beans?  That would do just fine.

One last thing and I’ll stop, for now.  Next time you want to get under the skin of a member of the Professional Managerial Caste, ask if s/he eats grits?  Heavens, no!  Polenta?  Absolutely!  Then tell your interlocutor that polenta is the same as grits, perhaps ground a bit finer.  My coarse local stone-ground grits with cream and butter (plus gouda cheese as a preferred option) is as good as anything I have ever had in a restaurant that recommends reservations.  And it’s good for you!

Part the Second: Well, That Apple Did Not Fall Far from the Tree.  Sometimes the apple falls far from the tree.  Witness the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, who fell from the tree and rolled down the hill and across the road into a fever swamp.  And sometimes the apple falls from the tree and never escapes the shade of its small canopy. Both alternatives can be good or bad.  OSS is our guide again with Mikhaila Peterson Is Reinventing Medicine Badly:

Are you looking for love but don’t want to explain why you’ve eliminated seed oils from your diet? The dating app Primal Match might be right for you. Made for MAHA followers, biohackers, and people who equate “chemical” with “toxic,” Primal Match is the latest commercial offering from Mikhaila Peterson, currently signing up interested parties for early access. (There’s a free tier but only the premium membership unlocks all features.)

Peterson rose to fame shortly after her father, the Canadian psychologist and reactionary public intellectual Jordan Peterson, who thought he might go to jail for misgendering someone. (This was never a possibility.) While her dad’s prominence came from his crusade against progressivism and his desire to teach young men to clean their room, Mikhaila’s was focused on food (not including lobster).

She had suffered from juvenile arthritis (and a slew of symptoms) and had allegedly cured herself by eliminating everything but steak and salt from her dietary regimen. Her carnivore diet, later renamed the Lion Diet, was the secret cure-all for chronic conditions that doctors were too incompetent or corrupt to heal. Even her dad’s refractory depression was supposedly obliterated by getting rid of pesky fruits, vegetables, and grains.

Taking a snapshot of what Mikhaila Peterson claims on her popular podcast at any point in time makes her look like a champion for the medically disaffected: she has figured out what ails them, and which expert can be trusted, and even sells you the solution.

But when we zoom out and watch her claims over time, it becomes obvious that what she is doing is attaching herself to a fringe theory, making money off of it, then moving on to the next one when her cure-all turns out not to have cured her after all.

This article explains where we are and why as a culture that has become incapable of rational discourse about anything and everything.  In Ms. Peterson’s case the cause of all her problems was food.  She called her all-beef diet the Lion Diet (no lionesses for her).  She claimed it cured her juvenile arthritis.  Perhaps, but half the children so diagnosed go into remission within ten years.  After a few years, she concluded that beef was making her sick so she switched to lamb and bison.  Whatever.

‘Tis a long story for Ms. Peterson.  The next culprit in her life story was mold.  Now, mold can cause all sorts of problems, but removal of it solves them:

The answer, at first, was her breast implants, which she had removed. Then, it was the “terrible tree allergies” she experienced while living in Tennessee, giving her brain fog. Subsequently, she moved to Miami in 2022, but the ill health did not abate. It turns out there was mould in her Florida house, which forced her to completely renovate it, sell it, and move to Arizona to undergo “mould treatment.” (I will be using the Canadian/British spelling; it is written “mold” in the United States.)

And so she took to her microphone to denounce mould as an invisible cause of illness. She created the website biotoxin.com to share papers linking mould to every conceivable disease and condition—autism, migraine, pain, even Parkinson’s disease. Sure, you can find individual studies showing preliminary evidence that there might possibly be some kind of link between mould exposure and, let’s say, dementia; but this should not be understood as “mould causes dementia.”

Despite this, in one of her podcast episodes, she plugs a US$ 300 kit that analyzes household dust for mould and a US$ 342 kit that tests for toxic molecules produced by mould. Its maker’s website reminds anxious consumers that mould can be “associated with” cancer, infertility, and multiple sclerosis. A different kit was subsequently endorsed by Mikhaila earlier this year: instead of paying once, this one is, of course, a subscription service. And it comes with supplements and a peptide to rescue your body from mould exposure.

OK, then.  The keywords for this article include: carnivore diet, mould, mitochondria, psychiatric drugs, supplements, beef organ, vaccination, and vitamin K.   Just read the whole thing when you have time and understand where we are.  Because unless we understand where we are, there is no way to get where we need to be.  But you do have to give Ms. Peterson credit.  She has mastered the art of getting ahead in America.  She fits right in.  But at some level, she may be getting it, finally:

Maybe we should just listen to Mikhaila’s own words. In 2021, she said that she used to be very much into hard scientific evidence, looking for peer-reviewed papers. “And now, I have no idea what’s true anymore,” she concluded before chuckling.

Whether to laugh or cry at this is the question.  The grift, it burns.

Part the Third: A Dietary Supplement with Evidence.  While I am a dietary supplement skeptic most of the time, I have no doubt they can work.  Several years ago when I was undergoing an extended course of radiation and chemotherapy I had a clinical colleague from the former Yugoslavia.  She looked after me and made sure I took my daily dose of Beres Drops, which she had a friend send to her.  I still have the bottle, label in Cyrillic, in the medicine cabinet.  I don’t know if the drops worked, but I do know that except for weight loss, I passed through that eight-week trial fairly well even as my immune system nearly disappeared toward the end.

What I find most doubtful about dietary supplements in the United States is the content in the bottle.  Supplements are not regulated for safety and effectiveness.  As I wrote here last December in a post about Marion Nestle and her What to Eat Now:

The rule on supplements is to be careful, very careful.  The supplement business is about making money above all.  Dietary supplements can be useful, but it is often impossible to know what is in the powder, pill, or capsule.  This was confirmed here and more recently here for melatonin, which is marketed as a sleep aid.  What is on the label is often not what is in the bottle.  A better case for “Caveat emptor!” is difficult to imagine.

Having said that, creatine is the dietary supplement that has evidence to back it up, as described in Creatine a Supplement With a Rare Commodity: Evidence:

I have always been a fan of the Olympics, particularly the 100-metre sprint to decide “the world’s fastest human.” Like all Canadians, I was elated when Ben Johnson won the event at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, then devastated when we learned that he had cheated by doping with stanozolol, a muscle-building synthetic steroid.

Then in 1992, at the Barcelona Olympics, British sprinter Linford Christie was crowned “the fastest human” and passed his urine test for any banned drugs. But he did admit to using a dietary supplement of creatine, which was then, and is now, allowed in athletic competitions.

Since Christie’s victory, creatine has raced from the track into hockey arenas, swimming pools, football fields and baseball diamonds with athletes looking to it for a quick burst of energy. The white powder has even made it into kitchens where people dissolve it in water and consume it with hopes of improving the results they obtain in the gym from resistance training.

And there is more. Preliminary evidence has surfaced indicating that creatine can not only provide energy to muscles, it can even energize the brain and improve cognition.

The article covers the history of creatine going back to 1832 and the work of Michel Chevreul, who was a founder of organic chemistry.  We all remember from 10^th-grade biology that “ATP is the energy currency of the cell.”  Creatine is essential for the maintenance of ATP levels in working muscle, and most of the research on creatine has been in muscle.  But creatine kinase, the essential enzyme in the pathway is also found in the brain as well as muscle, so there is reason to believe that creatine as a supplement can help athletes and thinkers, not that the two are as mutually exclusive as ESPN would lead us to believe.  This is the entirety of our biochemistry lesson for the day.

The other longevity/metabolic booster is said to be NADH, which is also essential for reactions that lead to the production of ATP.  I have my doubts, despite much “research” on the subject.  While my organic chemistry sensibility tells me that creatine (png)  will survive the very acidic stomach, one look at NADH (svg) fairly screams that it would be hydrolyzed into its two halves before it got to the lower gut and could be absorbed.  The organic chemists out there are welcome to set me straight.

In any case, if you are doing any sort of resistance training (which we all should) creatine is likely to help with recovery and muscle maintenance, especially as we get older.  Just make sure the bottle contains what the label says.  How you might do that is beyond me, however.  Which brings up the FDA, especially in the current administration.  Safety and effectiveness should be proven for all drugs, including the hundreds (thousands?) of dietary supplements on the market.  This is not a hard concept, except that in the post-Citizens United world gifted to us by Justice Anthony Kennedy, those with the most dollars have the most votes.  The supplement business has a lot of dollars.

Part the Fourth: The Tangled Web. As Fr. Stephen Freeman reminds us, quoting Sir Walter Scott, “O what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”  Yes, and has he notes, a modern pundit has rephrased this wisdom as, “Always tell the truth…It’s easier to remember.”

Thanks to an old friend, in both senses of the term as he would agree, I have been reading Fr. Stephen for a long time.  There is something about orthodoxy that is as comforting as it is ineffable and at times infuriating.  This might seem strange coming from a most heterodox person, but our worlds are many.  From Fr. Stephen:

Lies inevitably create a web of false narratives. In many ways, it’s a metaphor for sin itself. Sin begets sin that begets sin and the web ensnares us into a world of un-truth. A single thread of a spider’s web is tiny and weak. However, the combination of hundreds of such threads works to effectively hold its prey.

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If we pay attention to the web of lies through time, it becomes apparent that the “narrative reality” of our world is largely one of make-believe. Of course, if enough people believe the make-believe, it adds a greater heft to the “nothingness” around us (as paradoxical as that might be). As much as our lives are caught-up in the narrative reality of our culture, we struggle like flies caught in a spider’s web.

Fortunately, there’s a world of difference between a culture’s narrative-reality and the actual world itself. Trees do not lie. The ground does not lie. Spiders’ webs do not lie. The rocks speak the truth. Of course, the narrative about these things can be as false as any lie. This distinction between the world-as-truth and the narrative-as-lie can be very helpful in thinking through the Christian life.

Or any life.  The nothingness of our narrative reality is palpable, and it is leading us headlong into the abyss, unless we stand up and tell the truth.

Thank you for reading!  See you next week.  In the meantime, drink some good coffee, read a good book, and make time to take a nap.  The world will still be here when you wake up, better able to take it on.