A Grain of salt

I take towards the idea of government knowing what is ‘right’ about public health in the same way Mark Twain viewed the topic:

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Consider the ‘Food Pyramid’ of years ago, full of that healthy set of carbohydrates and such in much larger proportion to protein, which got a much smaller part of the Pyramid. If you lobbied the government hard enough you just might be able to get a better Pyramid place… and those who did helped to push carbohydrate rich foods out the door because it was ‘healthy’.

Turns out carbohydrates break down into sugars in the blood stream at a very rapid pace, thus you were giving your body quite a sugar rush going for the pasta, pizza, and breakfast bagel with OJ. Fast-forward 40 years and a much more complex interaction between protein uptake, fat utilization, types of fat (beyond the dreaded Trans-Fat) and alcohol all change metabolism when mixed with carbohydrates. Fiber in carbs plays a role on uptake, generally retarding it, thus a very high fiber food that has a relatively high total carb amount has a much lower net carbohydrate impact on your body.

What happened to that generation raised on high carb foods with low fiber, protein and fat? Overweight and have a prevalence of type II diabetes as their systems no longer can handle the incoming sugar loads and has grown resistant to its own insulin because of the surges done on a multiple times daily basis for years and decades. Mind you that was without a law in place to make it mandatory, save for the experimentation of our school children to get them hooked on ‘healthy eating’ which had the net result of pushing the onset of type II diabetes to a younger and younger age.

As for the FDA and the banning of products, it is notable that the reason we got an FDA, the drug so bad it had to be outlawed, was not so bad to sufferers of a particular disease. The drug was thalidomide, and the disease is ages known to mankind – Hanson’s Disease. Thalidomide would prove to be one of the first of a class of medications that actually was able to halt Hanson’s Disease and later medications would start ridding one’s system of it. Hanson’s Disease is hard to get, but the effects are debilitating and horrific. People were sent away from civilized areas so they would not interact with others. That disease had another name: Leprosy.

Another medication discovered oversease, used for decades and proven extremely safe and effective for its users faced a tough time getting past FDA approval. Even though it was effective for a class of disorders, no one knew how it worked, just that it did work. The drug has few side effects and has demonstrate a remarkable lack of bad symptoms if one overdoses on it… a child in France took a man’s supply for a month and got through the episode with no permanent ill effects, or even short term ones. It did, finally, get into the US once we started to understand the seratonin system, but it is not exactly a SRI… nor is it an amphetamine… it is beneficial in combination with some anti-depressants, but not for working with them but for helping to regulate a part of life essential to everyone: sleep. The drug is Modafinil, and the military uses it for those needing long periods of attentiveness for hours or even a day or two at a time. Its main users are narcoleptics, and it is beneficial to those who have depression not only for its stimulation of the nervous system, but for allowing sleep even when in the bloodstream. The FDA took its sweet time with that one…and it is still a Schedule IV drug… yet it is not addictive and the only misuse you can do with it is staying up way too long without sleep. Of course it is ‘abused’ by stock traders (or was) meaning there was a black market of the stuff. Interactions with illegal drugs is unknown due to lack of cross-use and clinical studies. But then the exact way it works is also, still, unknown but is helping to unravel what sleep is, how seratonin levels impact mood and emotions… and has a decades long safety record with millions if not 10s of millions of users over the last 30-40 years. You might use it to have a nice, long, wakeful weekend and then do your regular sleeping during the week to make it pass by faster… and that would be ‘abuse’!

For every ‘good’ of the FDA you can find drugs that have been banned that have other uses outside of its introductory use, drugs held up in the pipeline for years even though they have demonstrated track records, and classification of medications that is often head-scratching. Add that to the ‘healthy diet’ that is pushed when we finally learn that diet is individuated and that even in groups of people trends cannot tell you what the outcome of a given eating regimen is to YOU… and then you do begin to question of how such good things that government wants for a ‘majority’ of the population effects you when you are in the ‘minority’ to which those things do not apply. Heaven help you if you get sick and government has dictated that the things you need are not available, hard to get, or illegal.

ajacksonian on April 21, 2010 at 2:43 PM