Anthropology

Hola mi Gente,
It’s been a lonnnnnng two weeks, but thanks to the leadership at my organization, I’m seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

Sculpture: The Raven and the First Men by Bill Reid

When the missionaries first came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.
 -- Desmond Tutu, South African Bishop

When I attended university, I was in my late 30s, married, and was actually exceedingly well read. I would say, without conceit, that you will probably not meet many people that have read more than I have.

I went to school not so much to learn in the traditional sense, but to become a part of a community of scholars. I didn’t attend school to get a career, or make more money, but because I wanted to engage with like-minded individuals and test what I had learned previously and in that way, learn anew. I learned many things, chief among them that learning in the context of a community is quite different from learning in isolation.

I also discovered that my notions of science, or rather, how knowledge is gathered and accepted (or not accepted) is not as logical as I had thought previously. I quickly wanted to explore the origins of knowledge (epistemology), and how culture impacted our collective concept of knowledge. It has become part of my life’s work, to research the researchers, to focus the light of my curiosity on those who study others.

It led me to a completely new field of work called cultural studies and into the realm of the philosophy of science. It started innocently enough: I was taking a class on counseling and there was a section on cross-cultural issues and I learned that how people describe their ailments have a deep connection to cultural values. I learned Western medical science wasn't so much a science as it was an art, deeply influenced by cultural mores and a body of research conducted mostly by privileged white men.

In addition, much of the research I was coming across regarding Latino/as, for example, seemed to me to be deeply flawed -- not congruent with my own experiences growing up Latino in the US. Then while working as a research assistant, I came across Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and I discovered that the history of science wasn’t one that marched in a straight line, with newer innovations replacing older ones as they became known or discovered. Kuhn wrote about paradigm shifts in a way that demonstrated that the history of science is one of fits and starts, rather than a linear evolution.

Then I came across anthropology and in reading earlier anthropological works, I came to see clearly that culture is an inescapable equation when it comes to science. Some of this science history is sad, brutal, and tragic even. As part of a class assignment, I came across the following piece written by a Naïve American poet. See if you get its message:

Anthropology
(excerpt)
Chrystos. (1991). Dream on (1 ed.). Vancouver, BC: Press Gang Publishers.

We have been conducting an extensive footnoted annotated indexed and complicated study of the Caucasian culture hereafter to be referred to as the cauks for ease in translation.

The most important religious ritual, one central to all groups, is the mixing of feces and urine with water. This rite occurs regularly on a daily basis and seems to be a cornerstone of the culture's belief system. The urns for this purpose are commonly porcelain, of various hues, although white is the most frequently used. The very wealthy rulers have receptacles of carved onyx or malachite with gold plated fixtures. We have been unable to determine what prayers are said during this ritual because its solitary nature & the fact that the door to the prayer room is always shut.

The main function of the majority of non-city dwellers is the production of an object called a lawn. Numerous tools for the cultivation of this lawn are sold in the market places. It appears also to have a sacred character, as no activity occurs on it & keeping it short green & square is a constant activity.

The main diet of the culture is available from push-button machines or orange plastic small markets and was found by our researchers to be completely inedible. It is truly amazing what the human animal can subsist on.

Another prominent feature of the cauks is the construction of huge monuments built in clusters in the villages. These are not living quarters but are used about five days a week for a ritual involving papers which appear to be sacred, given the life or death quality with which they are handled. The papers are passed about, often with consternation and eventually cast away when the spell is complete.

The mechanisms for healing disease appear to our eyes to be woefully complex & at the same time, inadequate. People who are seriously ill are quarantined in jails of pale green or white and often used to feed machines which appear to run on human blood.

Children who are born deformed in any way are usually confined to jails built for this purpose. The elderly are also jailed, there being no value system of respect for them. Those passing through transitions are called "crazy" and also jailed. Animals from distant lands again are jailed. In fact, there is some discussion of an alternative theory of central religious belief -- that the actual spiritual purpose of the culture, is to jail as much as possible. Extensive use of fences is the key argument to this theory.

Our data is yet incomplete. We hope by 1992 to have a more comprehensive overview, at which time a traveling exhibition of artifacts (including exhumed bodies to illustrate their burial practices) will tour for the education of all. Their attitude toward all non-cauk peoples is extremely hostile & violent. Many of our researchers have been massacred & yet, in the interests of science, we persevere.

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My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Friday Sex Blog [Sex and Science]

Hola mi Gente,

I’m currently working in one of the most challenging complexes on Rikers Island. I’m just sayin’… LOL

It’s Friday, so it’s all about s-e-x...

Sex, Science & the Egg & the Sperm

It has fallen on science to sort through language and culture to arrive at an “objective” truth. But I have always been intrigued on how culture and language shape science. Since ancient times the feminine has been depicted as creative and fruitful but needing to be dissected, shaped, and controlled by “male” reason. The 17^th century English philosopher and inventor of inductive reasoning, Francis Bacon, writing within the historical context of widespread persecution of witches, described a scientific process that included images of nature as female, to be restrained, tortured, and probed by mechanical inventions. “Never ought a man to make a scruple,” he wrote, “of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object... ”

Really? ::blank stare::

Sexual difference became an obsession of science during the Enlightenment era, with an exploration of the differences between the sexes, based on anatomy. In contrast, older, more traditional cultures had used ritual to link the social and natural worlds, so that rituals were the authority, and in a similar way, the rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment claimed nature set down social laws that should be followed. In 1735, for example, the Swedish botanist, Linnaeus, published his classification of plants, describing them in terms of their sexual parts. The males were the dominant, defining parts; the females were secondary and submissive. Such examples were used as a “natural” justification of the subjugation of women. In other words, men and women were not equals.

In this way the identification of women with nature and emotion and men with culture and reason was created. This association of women with nature defined as motherly and physical -- so that their ideal role was in the home as nurturers -- was also used to link them with superstition, depicting the feminine as an obstacle to progress. Both men and women were defined biologically, but while men were free to engage many different parts of the public sphere, women’s roles were tightly controlled and limited by their “natural” function.

In 1759, Linnaeus came up with the term Mammalia, naming an entire class of animals after lactating mammary glands, a feature that roughly only half ever possess. Linnaeus could have chosen external body hair, for example, as a better defining characteristic. However, he was embroiled in a propaganda war against wet nursing, and was more concerned about emphasizing how “natural” it was for a mother to suckle her own child. According the scientific consensus of the time, the breast was a symbol of the natural bond between mother and child, and in that way, women were limited in their role in the home at the center of the family. It was therefore seen as biologically normal and morally good and the emphasis on breastfeeding was another way of limiting women to domestic roles and keeping them from the public sphere and away from political power.

Lest you think this is some ancient way of thinking, please note that this bias still exists. Take note that today language and gender roles continue to confound science. Anthropologist Emily Martin wrote a thought-provoking essay on this issue titled The sperm and the egg. In order to shed some light on the gender stereotypes hidden within the scientific language of biology, Emily Martin pointed to major scientific textbooks’ depiction of male and female reproductive organs as systems for the production of eggs and sperm. Therefore, within the female cycle, menstruation is clothed in the language of failure. The sloughing of the uterine lining is termed “debris,” for example. On the other hand, male reproductive processes are described in positive terms such as the “maturation” or the immense manufacturing of sperm.

She noted that scientific descriptions served to reinforce gender stereotypes and in that way, functions of the egg and the sperm were misunderstood. For example, the egg was seen as passive. It does not move, but “is transported” along fallopian tube. In contrast, sperm are active: they “deliver'' their genes to the egg and, '”activate'” its developmental program. Some researchers likened the egg’s role to that of Sleeping Beauty: a dormant bride waiting for her lover’s magic kiss, which brings her to life. This language is in line with the tradition started by Linnaeus and Bacon. A tradition that has as its roots a form of misogyny.

Recently the researchers at Johns Hopkins University concluded that the sperm and the egg stick together because of adhesive molecules on the surfaces of each. The egg traps the sperm and adheres to it so tightly that the sperm’s head is forced to lie flat against the outer layer of the egg. In other words, the egg isn’t “passive” it is proactive in the reproductive process. The trapped sperm continues to wiggle ineffectively. If the digestive enzymes released by the sperm start to soften the zona just at its tip the fragile sperm can get oriented in the right direction and make it through the zona.

Yet, even this new version of the role of the egg and the sperm helped little in changing the narrative at the cultural level. Researchers who made the discovery themselves continued to write papers using the same stereotypical metaphor of sperm as the “active” party who “penetrates” the egg.

And there you have it, how even science is confounded by language and culture.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Hordes of Unreason

¡Hola! Everybody...
I had meant to post after the holidays, but it needed airing out. Sorry for the lackadaisical editing and for making it so long... For those who don’t read me regularly, please be careful and enjoy the holidays.

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-=[ The Age of Unreason ]=-

in Times of Uncertainty

An open mind is a valuable thing, just not so open that your brains fall out.

My friend Will (Astranavigo) likes to point out what he feels is a sad but true reality: our nation (USA) has gone dumb. The nation is full of idiots, he states, and I would be hard-pressed to argue that position. However, I think the issue of ignorance in this country is little more nuanced. It’s not so much that people are dumb, or stupid. Rather it has more to do with a tendency toward unreason. Too many people are attached to what historian Susan Jacoby calls “unreason” and mistaking that dysfunction for skepticism or critical thinking.

In her work, Jacoby surveys the anti-rational landscape from reality TV and “infantainment,” videos for babies, to a pseudo-intellectual universe of “junk thought.” This vast realm of junk thought reaches from semiliterate blogs of all political persuasions to institutions of so-called higher education that offer that do not require students to obtain a thorough grounding in American and world history, science, and literature. Throughout our culture, contempt for logic and evidence is fostered by the infotainment media from television to the Web; aggressive anti-rational religious fundamentalism; poor public education; the intense politicization of intellectuals themselves.

The consequences are numerous and far-reaching. If you’re wondering how junk science such as creationism and the deniers of anthropogenic global warming get traction, look no further than this unreason posing as “skepticism.” I recently posted a blog that mentioned the consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), the theory that global warming is caused by human activity. One respondent called it a hoax, others chimed in that the science is “uncertain” and “subjective.”

Let me be clear about this: nothing could be further from the truth. The scientific consensus on AGW is almost as unanimous as the science can get. Certainties are rare in science. Even the appearance of the sun over the horizon tomorrow morning can be reduced to a question of probability. On the question of climate change, scientists say they are more than 90 percent sure that it’s happening and that humans are responsible. If you knew anything about science, or ever worked on a research project, that last statement would awe you.

Sure, you just never know, but scientists embrace that kind of skepticism. It’s through doubting certainties of the world (the flatness of the earth, the utility of bloodletting) that scientists advance human knowledge. But no serious scientist will stand up and denounce a widely accepted scientific theory without making a verifiable argument to the contrary. Yet, that’s what some participants in this forum are doing. They are not scientists; are not experts on climate science, nor have they been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but they will tell you that I am a bully because I shove this scientific consensus in their face.

I just don’t abide quackery, nor those who would promote it. While it may be true (but highly improbable) that someone might come out disproving evolutionary theory or show that the world is flat, I don’t see that happening any time soon and if deferring to scientific knowledge is a form of “hero worship” or “bullying,” then, yup, that’s me!

Scientists -- real scientists -- bind themselves to a strict set of standards, setting out their theories and experiments carefully, subjecting them to review by other credible scholars who are knowledgeable in their field, and publishing their findings in reputable journals such as Science and Nature. The people who approach the science of climate change with that kind of integrity have agreed on its underlying premise for years.

The French physicist Joseph Fourier first postulated the greenhouse effect in 1824. In the 1850s, the Irish physicist John Tyndall figured out a way to test and measure the capacity of various gases to absorb and transmit radiant energy. By 1858, he effectively proved Fourier’s theory. At the end of the century -- the 19^th century -- the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius advanced the theory even further. Arrhenius, considered the father of physical chemistry, was the first to predict that humans might actually increase the temperature of the earth by burning fossil fuels and increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Over the last two hundred years, humans have been digging fossil fuels and setting fire to them, reintroducing the carbon to oxygen and releasing the resulting carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Arrhenius estimated that a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase Earth’s temperature by 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit. This is a remarkable bit of science considering that the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that a doubling of carbon dioxide will increase global temperature between 3.6 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit. What is unnerving is that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen since 1850 by more than one third and we’re on track of reaching Arrhenius’s doubling by sometime the middle of this century.

The science progressed on through the 1960s and by the 1970s, scientists were getting nervous, beginning to speak as one voice. In 1979, a National Academy of sciences report said, “A plethora of studies from diverse sources indicates a consensus that climate change will result from man’s combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land use.” It was also becoming clear that even a small increase in climate warming could disrupt a balance that has existed before humans. They began warning of melting ice glaciers and collapsing ice caps, of floods and droughts and rising tides. They began to envision a change in living conditions more dramatic than anything that has happened in hundreds of thousands of years.

I offer all this as a way of contextualizing the subject matter. I am neither a scientist nor a historian, and I have no intention of jumping into the “scientific debate.” Someone on my previous post mentioned that attaining a grasp of this issue is almost possible, but that’s patently untrue. You can go online and read the Assessment Report of the IPCC, a scientific collaboration of unprecedented breadth, depth, and reputation. You can Google Elizabeth Kolbert’s brilliant New Yorker series, The Climate of Man. Alternatively, you can pick up one of the great populist science books on the subject: scientist Andrew Weaver’s (Canada) Keeping Our Cool; Tim Flannery’s (Australia) The Weathermakers; Kolbert’s later book Field Notes from a Catastrophe; and yes, even Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Any one of these will give you solid enough grasp of the science to leave you at least somewhat shaken about the state of our world.

My point, however, is that no one seems to be confused about climate change. As far as the scientific bodies of the world are concerned, as in the theory of gravity, the question of the flatness of the earth, and evolutionary theory, the consensus exists, not because a band of wild-haired pencil-necked academics want to take over the world on some presumed conspiracy, but because the science has answered the question.

With each new experiment, each new report, with each new article published in legitimate peer-reviewed scientific journals, the science community became more certain. Naomi Oreske tested the question of consensus in a paper she published in the journal Science in 2005. Oreskes searched the vast ISI Web of Knowledge for refereed scientific journal articles on global climate change that were published between 1993 and 2003. She analyzed them on the basis of whether they supported, contradicted, or took no position on the consensus that the human release of greenhouse gases was causing climate change -- and not a single study took exception with the consensus position.

Not one.

So, while there are those here who claim otherwise, the fact of the matter contradicts their statements. I don’t know about you, but if I want a medical opinion I don’t go to the shoemaker down the street.

What has happened in the last 20 years is that the mainstream press has presented the issuewith a false sense of “balance.” The brothers Jules and Max Boykoff, published an article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Environmental Change in 2003 titled “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S. Prestige Press.” they searched the libraries of four “prestige” newspapers in the United States -- The New York times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times -- and analyzed their coverage of climate between 1998 and 2002. They found that while the scientific press was coming down to 928 to zero in accepting climate change, in 53 percent of their stories these four newspapers quoted a scientist on “one side” of the issue and spokesperson on the other.

I say spokesperson rather than scientist for legitimate reasons. First, the deniers were very often not scientists, but rather political ideologues or self-appointed “experts” (not unlike some here) from think tanks. Secondly, even when the experts had scientific credentials, in most of the cases those cred3entials were not relevant to the topic at hand. The experts were geologists or economists commenting outside their field of expertise, not climate scientists reporting on up to date peer-reviewed science.

In matters involving social policy, such as abortion or economic strategies, this isn’t such a bad thing. Science, ion the other hand, is a discipline in which there legitimate experts, people whose knowledge is weighed and measured by their scientific peers. This is the process people use, for example, to decide a surgical procedure or the structural strength of a new alloy. If I were to come to you and suggest that inserting my penis into your rectum is a good surgical procedure for your sore throat, would you accept my theory? If not then why are we accepting the nonsense being thrown around by public relations entities, pundits, and bloggers who know nothing of the subject, let alone the process of the scientific method?

And if I refuse to listen to pointless diatribes about “democracy in science” (science is beholden only to the truth), or to read the contents of websites proclaiming a “climate gate” (conspiracy!) does that make me an “authoritarian,” or a “bully” or closed-minded?

If it does, then I will state here unequivocally that I am proud to wear those labels. Just go argue against creationism, evolution, or AGW somewhere else. As far as I’m concerned (and the science agrees) the relevant discussion is not whether AGW is real, but about finding effective solutions for it. When and if there is an equal, credible body of knowledge that refutes AGW, or that world is round, I will be the first to own up to it. Until then, the shoemaker? He doesn’t get to tell me the earth is flat.

Ciao,

Eddie

Right Wing-nuts vs. Science

¡Hola! Everybody...
Stupid is as...

LOL!

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-=[ The Right Wing War Against Science ]=-

To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.

-- Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888)

The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist-Tin-Foil-Hat-Brigade as a propaganda windfall. To these quacks, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial “smoking gun”: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.

I am blessed with a talented and intelligent son, my only child (as far as I can tell). He is now 25 years-old. I treasure many memories from his childhood. Early on, I sold him on the notion of training to become a “scholar/ warrior.” Basically, I wanted to give him the best education possible. That education included learning in many different disciplines, from art and music, martial arts, poetry, philosophy, the healing arts, and so on. Luckily, for me, he bought my sales pitch, completely.

Today, he is a talented as a musician, as well as having received a degree. He was also born with a natural aptitude for drawing and painting, something we tried to support as soon as we discovered his childhood doodles were actually accurate portraits.

When he was around 8-9 years-old, we all joined a martial arts (Wing Chun) school. There he learned the trick that gave him some expertise in the art of self-defense. Please note that I am deliberately choosing the word trick. Our sufi (instructor) used it often in our martial arts training when guiding him in the trick of mentally registering attacks before they became dangers, aiming his focus ahead, learning to anticipate. I also showed him the trick of avoiding unnecessary confrontation. He once told me that he was especially proud of learning that trick. It helped embolden him and gave him confidence.

I recently posted a link exposing of how quack Climate Crash deniers (Beck, Rush, Drudge, Faux news, etc.) have had some fun with stolen emails. Essentially, the piece showed how these Climate change deniers have taken lines from these emails out of context in an effort to refute decades of scientific research. If you go there, you will find one individual who calls himself “weinerfest” posting outright fabrications.

He stated, for example, that one scientist admitted purposely excluding data from previous warming periods. I then posted the full email showing the scientist never said anything of the sort. There were several more attempts to pass off disinformation and each time, I used either the emails themselves or citations from scientific bodies to show he was posting, at best, falsehoods. I would say he was intentionally lying, but that’s just conjecture (LOL)!) His stance, like the rest of the clowns on the right, is that these emails prove that decades of basic research in climate science has been one elaborate hoax. One such email, out of thousands hacked from a public research university in Norwich, England, has attracted a lot of attention. The line reads thus:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Utilizing “neoconservative logic,” the word “trick” and the word “hide,” you see, prove that all this “research” and “data” about climate is phony and the GOP Clown Car headed by Beck & Co., know better than the scientists! Of course, the fact there is isn’t one scientifically recognized body in the world that disagrees with the scientific consensus that climate change is caused by human activity has no bearing in this “discussion.”

Almost every scientific organization from almost every scientific discipline has issued statements that agree with the scientific consensus. Not one internationally recognized scientific body has refuted the consensus. For those unfamiliar with the scientific method, this is indeed a rare occurrence.

There are some groups, consisting mostly of unpublished scientists, individuals, as well your local weatherman and bodega owner (and possibly Ms. Cleo), that have signed on to a public statement saying they disagree with the scientific consensus, but few have been able to submit a rigorously researched study that can pass academic muster.

In fact, empirical studies show that among scientists that have been published in peer-reviewed journals, the consensus is overwhelming.

Now, back to the word “trick.” Trick is used in the sense of “method” as in... “the trick to blocking a punch... ” “Hide” refers to a well-known (to scientists) anomaly in reconstructing climate after 1960. Tree ring density is reliable before then, but diverges later, due to human-caused environmental reasons unique to the last 50 years. Meaningful graphs omit or hide that part of tree ring based measurement in favor of more scientifically reliable and direct measurements.

Science is based on evidence and re-examination. That is why “cold fusion,” having initially created a excitement, fell so fast. Outright fraud is found very quickly. Ask DNA falsifier Hwang Woo-Suk, who caused a stir in cloning research and was quickly debunked. Scientists love to disprove flawed research. It makes them famous.

It comes from the Scientific Method.

Back to the Tin Foil Hat Brigade. To them, anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is a hoax. Why? Because of a few emails, taken out of context, shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s been a hoax!

Yeah right...

The impressive thing about this so-called “conspiracy” is that the scientists managed to convince the planet’s glaciers, sea ice, and hydrological cycles to play along.

Deniers from the right, like Weiner, who have waged war on science on many different fronts, should consider the methods of science sometime.

Love,

Eddie

Coming to Terms [Theory of Science]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Something short today. It seems many people just don’t understand some basic definitions. Here’s one...

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-=[ Theory of Science ]=-

Evolution is just a theory. It is not a fact.

::sigh::

Many, many people tell me that we live in a nation of idiots -- an Idiocracy, if you will. As much as I love people, I can’t argue too well against this assertion. Take the denial of the scientific consensus on global warming and the above statement as two prime examples...

The word theory, in its scientific context, does not imply an opinion or an uncertainty. It means, “a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena.” In other words, a theory is an explanation or model based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning, especially one that has been tested and confirmed as a general principle helping to explain and predict natural phenomena.

Any scientific theory must be based on a careful and rational examination of the facts. A clear distinction needs to be made between facts (things that can be observed and/or measured) and theories (explanations that correlate and interpret the facts.)

In the case of the theory of evolution, the following are some of the phenomena involved. All are facts:

• Life appeared on earth more than two billion years ago;
• Life forms have changed and diversified over life’s history;
• Species are related via common descent from one or a few ancestors;
• Natural selection is a significant factor affecting how species change.

Many other facts are explained by the theory of evolution as well.

The theory of evolution has proved itself in practice. It has useful applications in epidemiology, pest control, drug discovery, and many other areas. It is by far the most influential and important theory of the biomedical sciences.

Besides the theory, there is the fact of evolution, the observation that life has changed greatly over time. The fact of evolution was recognized even before Darwin’s theory, the theory of evolution explains the fact.

If the rationale, “only a theory,” were a valid objection, creationists would be also be issuing disclaimers about the theory of gravity, atomic theory, the germ theory of disease, and the theory of limits (on which calculus is based). The theory of evolution is no less valid than any of these. Even the theory of gravity receives serious challenges. Yet the phenomenon of gravity, like evolution, is still a fact.

Creationism, a sham science, is neither theory nor fact; it is, if I’m generous, merely an opinion. Since it explains nothing, it is useless. Please note how people of different political persuasions align themselves with theories and facts. Of course, facts are facts, regardless of denial. Creationists refuse to subject their “theories” to peer reviews, because they know they don’t fit the facts. Creation “scientists” are merely biblical fundamentalists who cannot accept anything contrary to their sectarian religious beliefs.

Reagan asserted that facts are stupid things, when in reality facts are stubborn things...

That’s it for today’s lesson...

Love,

Eddie

Monday Mythbusters [Salt and Hypertension]

¡Hola! Everybody...
As a New Yorker, the best thing I can say today (sports-wise) is that the at least the Yankees don’t suck... LOL

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-=[ Bacalao con Viandas ]=-

The other day, I had the pleasure of ordering one of my favorite dishes: bacalao con vianda. Viandas are vegetables: yautias (taro root) malanga (root vegetable with brown skin and white or purple flesh), papas (potatoes), plátanos (plantain bananas), yucas (cassava), ñames (root vegetable with brown skin and white flesh), batatas (sweet potatoes). These are mixed with onions sliced into rings, Olive oil, sliced hard-boiled eggs, aguacates (avocados), and sliced tomatoes. I love this dish! My dear departed grandmother ate a plate of this everyday of her life and she lasted until her mid 90s -- a vibrant, ass-kicking old lady. LOL .It’s a very West African-influenced dish.

Anyway, I love smothering the vianda with olive oil and sal5t -- lots of salt! As I covered the various toot vegetables with salt, my friends immedat5ely pounced, admonishing me for using so much salt and reminding me that high blood pressure (hypertension) runs in Latino/a culture.

I didn’t want to argue, but the connection between salt and hypertension is overblown, to say the least... plus, if I want to use salt, muthafuckas, I’ll use salt! LOL

This claim remains controversial in the medical community. Well, at least according to my research. The more researchers delve into this issue, the more difficult it becomes to justify. In fact, a 1988 editorial in the British Medical Journal, after reviewing a slew of studies, concluded that, “the evidence that salt is [an] important [contributor to high blood pressure] is weak... [and] the more complex the analysis the weaker the relation.”

The body of literature regarding this issue is so vast, that no one could successfully synthesize all the findings. What happens usually is that one camp will select studies that favor their position. However, more recent studies show that there never really was a connection between salt and hypertension. And when you look at the studies, you begin to get a picture of why. The way it was explained to me is that the subject has been studied in three basic ways. The first searches for a connection between salt consumption and hypertension within a given society. Such research has been fruitless. In one of the largest such studies, which tested 7,000 residents of Scotland, it turned out that weight and age were much moiré reliable predictors of hypertension than salt consumption was. “The true association between sodium and blood pressure is extremely weak,” the researchers surmised.

The second approach is to look at many different countries to see whether the places where hypertension is common are also places where people consume a lot of salt. The results from one huge study of more than 10,000 subjects at fifty-two testing centers around the world did find an association between sodium in the urine and systolic blood pressure. However, upon close examination, the link turned out to be far less impressive. Once adjustments were made for the subjects’ age, weight, and alcohol consumption, the relation was statistically significant in only eight of the fifty-two centers. And when the results from four nonindustrialized societies (where salt consumption was extremely low) were set aside, the relation vanished.

Of course, even if high salt consumption and high blood pressure did go hand in hand, that wouldn’t prove that one causes the other. Something else could be at work -- a third factor that might be associated with certain eating habits and hypertension. That would explain the paradox of Japan, where salt usage is high, but blood pressure is not.

In the last type of study, researchers ask people to eat less salt and then watch to see what happens to their blood pressure. One review of twelve such studies found that sodium restriction was a useful strategy for older patients with hypertension. However, there wasn’t any reason to think that using less salt would lower the blood pressure of people who are hypertensive to begin with. In addition, such studies have nothing to say about whether salt caused the hypertension -- an idea that has become increasingly doubtful as the studies have become more sophisticated.

I always say that a little moderation in is always a worthwhile goal when it comes to diet. In the meantime, I will slather my bacalao con vianda with lots of salt and olive oil!

Love,

Eddie