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white_collar_crimeUpdate 09.13.09: The NYT has now written the mother of all articles on enforcement of clean water laws (which was the main complaint from this post) — thank you NYT:
Toxic Waters, Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering
Why Are Southerners So Fat?<
By Claire Suddath, Thursday, Jul. 09, 2009
Time Magazine — get your reporters to do their homework.
Time has an article about obesity in the Southern USA, and goes through the usual folk wisdom,
. . .So there you have it. Southerners have little access to healthy food and limited means with which to purchase it. It’s hard for them to exercise outdoors, and even when they do have the opportunity, it’s so hot, they don’t want to. To combat this affliction, some Southern states have adopted programs to fight rising obesity. In 2003, Arkansas passed a school body mass index–screening program that assesses weight and sends the results home to parents. Tennessee encourages its schools to buy fresh ingredients from local growers. And in 2007, Mississippi adopted nutritional standards for school lunches. Most of these programs are relatively new, so it will be a few years before experts can determine their efficacy. “I think there’s reason for optimism,” says Barrett. “But it’s likely that the Southeast will lag behind the rest of the country for some time to come.”
This is incredibly scary — US health policy is based on folk lore, rather than actual . . . um. . data. Policy by truthiness. TIME — what gives? Was the science editor sleeping?
Last year some reports came out linking environmental arsenic to diabetes and — separately — pointing to arsenic as a thryoid hormone disrupter. (See the post: Does environmental arsenic contamination cause obesity by disrupting thyroid hormone mediated gene regulation? (11.06.08)).
And where is arsenic in the drinking water (and food) especially prevalent? In Mississippi silt. Moreover, when I went back to update the research, I found a fair amount of work on chicken feed additives that contain arsenic — that goes into the chicken, and also gets dumped into the ground water. (Roxarsone, 4-Hydroxy -3-nitrobenzenearsonic acid). This was a serious enough risk that it was banned in Europe. I thought it might be because of arsenic treatment in wood (the Southern pines are used in the wood industry), but maybe there’s a connection with poultry farming.
Here are the papers f rom last year; I didn’t find further research on arsenic as an endocrine disrupter:
Arsenic disrupts thyroid hormone gene regulation, Davey et al., “Arsenic as an Endocrine Disruptor: Arsenic Disrupts Retinoic Acid Receptor–and Thyroid Hormone Receptor–Mediated Gene Regulation and Thyroid Hormone–Mediated Amphibian Tail Metamorphosis, “ Environ Health Perspect. 116: 165–172 (2008). doi: 10.1289/ehp.10131
;
Arsenic exposure is correlated with Type 2 diabetes, Navas-Acien et al., “Arsenic Exposure and Prevalence of Type 2 Diabetes in US Adults,” JAMA 300: 814-822 (2008) PMID: 18714061
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8 responses so far ↓
1 Brad // Jul 11, 2009 at 5:30 am
I read that article. Are you saying the Time reporter should have mentioned Arsenic as one of the possible causes or the cause? I’m not sure how to interpret your point. I hadn’t thought about Arsenic, but thanks for raising my interest about Arsenic and obesity.
I agree the article was not specific and seems more like an entertainment read, rather than a serious article with backing of scientific data. I’ve noticed a lot of articles not just from Time that seem like they are written for a quick entertaining read leaving out things and raising more questions than the article answers.
2 swivelchair // Jul 11, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Hey Brad thanks for the comment.
Answer: Yes. I’m saying that the reporter should have been more fact-based.
Think about this: In Arkansas, if you kid has a BMI over the upper limit, you get a note from the school. Then you get instruction for behavioral modification.
Arkansas has tons of Tyson’s chicken farms, that (until recently, apparently) are reported to have fed chickens with the feed containing arsenic. In the 1980’s Tyson’s bought Valmac in Arkansas, with $400MM in sales. I don’t know if there was arsenic – laced chicken feed leaching into the water supply, but there is an interesting connection with obesity rates increasing from the 1980’s.
You tell me — connection? At least check into it. I don’t know.
OK. We are anonymous bloggers. This took like 2 minutes on the internet to google “Tysons” + Arkansas. I don’t have a press pass to call up the USGS and say, hey, can you send over your water-table arsenic data for Arkansas since the 1980’s? and then call the CDC and say, hey, can you send over your obesity data for Arkansas since the 1980’s? You could do this on a bad day after an all night binge drinking episode on no coffee, and probably have a decent article. It’s not that hard to do.
The article could be entertaining, I suppose, but isn’t the Science column supposed to be based on . . . um. . . say. . . objective fact?
I mean, if you were that parent in Arkansas who has a kid busted by the BMI police, wouldn’t you at least want to know about the arsenic –> endocrine –> thyroid connection, particularly if you lived near that Tyson’s chicken plant? Wouldn’t you want to know if there was arsenic in the ground water that you feed your infants? I’m not saying that any of this is the case, only that that would have been an interesting report, and not all that tough to put together.
3 follow the money // Jul 24, 2009 at 11:31 am
Tyson is a huge company that has every reason to want these sorts of findings to remain obscure. I’m sure they keep current with any developments that may affect the bottom line, and the research linked in this post raises the terrifying (to Tyson and other factory farm companies) specter of a class-action lawsuit.
Also, there is another possible factor that I think needs further attention: The growth hormones factory animals are stuffed full of so as to fatten up as quickly as possible (50 pounds a month in the case of pigs). A friend who spent a lot of her childhood in Israel in the early 70’s told me about at one point noticing that all the other girls her age (13 and 14) had very large breasts for their age. Israel’s primary protein source at that time was chicken (may still be, I don’t know), and the chickens were given hormones to increase the breast size (of the chicken) and the effect seems to have carried through to adolescent girls who ate the chicken regularly.
4 swivelchair // Jul 24, 2009 at 9:48 pm
FTM, Tysons and Purdue did for chicken what Calvin Klein did for jeans — took a generic product and branded it, and made it national. All of this started in the 1980’s — just when the CDC obesity tables show that obesity started to increase in this country.
With mass production, comes the need for cost reduction. Probably the need for arsenic in the chicken feed was because of overcrowding — with overcrowding, pathogens increased, hence the need for arsenic in the chicken feed.
I don’t think that chicken breasts are the same as human breasts. Chicken breasts are pure protein. Human breasts are mostly fatty tissue. Growth hormones were found to work gangbusters on chickens — except that the half life of a chicken is like 3 weeks, and the growth hormones took 2 years to really work well. It was a bust, so to speak.
5 follow the money // Jul 25, 2009 at 9:33 am
Yeah, I understand the differences between muscle protein and mammary glands, and the correlation was based on anecdotal observation rather than any definitive studies, but the phenomenon was caused by something and growth hormone seemed a likely candidate.
I’d need to call and ask, but I vaguely recall her saying the problem ceased when the hormone being used was replaced with another type. It’d be hard to guess how a hormone intended for one purpose would act in a different context without conducting the appropriate research, and these young women were not in any way obese. And that’s not to mention the possible synergistic effects of exogenous hormones, arsenic, and all the other pollutants and contaminants mixed up inside us these days.
6 swivelchair // Jul 25, 2009 at 1:01 pm
FTM that would be interesting. I really think there is an environmental overload going on here as far as the Southern US goes, anyway. My point was that if US policy is being made for anti-obesity, at least use some science, rather than purely cultural aspects. After all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Here’s an article from this past may: Agriculture Ministry Allowed Sale of Arsenic Tainted Poultry – Haaritz July 5, 2009 (by: Amiram Cohen, Ran Reznick, Jonathan Lis and Yuval Goren)
Looks like the same thing — chicken and pork were laced with arsenic from the feed — feed needed because of mass production. There is a scandal with the agricultural ministry not banning it soon enough.
I found this in like 30 seconds searching “usda poultry feed arsenic” – the arsenic in poultry feed ends up in poultry litter, which is spread on agricultural crops and then leached into the groundwater where people drink it:
FATE AND TRANSPORT OF ORGANOARSENIC POULTRY FEED ADDITIVES IN AN AGRICULTURAL WATERSHED
Here’s a consumer reports link: Animal Feed and the Food Supply: Chicken and Arsenic
Here’s the WaPo Op-Ed and related links: A Deadly Ingredient in a Chicken Dinner
Why do our chicken, our water and our air contain arsenic?
I don’t know if this has health effects or not, but literature shows that arsenic disrupts the thyroid hormone function — which could lead to obesity. Chicken farms, chicken guano fertilizer, agriculture, groundwater — all of this in the Southern US could lead to the geographic concentration of those who are obese. Instead, our public health policy is based on cultural reports — eat less, exercise more, have more fresh fruit and veggies. OK. I get that. But at least look at the environmental concerns now that the mode of action is known.
7 follow the money // Jul 27, 2009 at 3:01 am
Thanks for taking the time to respond and for posting the links. It’s some very interesting stuff that I’ll make sure a friend of mine gets who works with water conservation groups in the Southeast (an exercise in frustration for the most part). There are so many chicken farms in the State I live in that the local whitewater club gives a rating of one, two, or three chickens for each river. Three chickens is bad… real bad.
It’s unfortunate that there’s not more focus on the obscure but available technology that can filter the heavy metal and other pollution from farm waste runoff using native higher fungi, which would at least remove one contamination vector for arsenic.
Test plots have shown heavily contaminated water (heavy metals, hydrocarbons, phosphates, excess nitrogen, E. coli, etc.) that flowed through live myco-filtration beds was sufficiently filtered to be considered potable according to EPA standards. There are amazing solutions out there being developed even if the media hasn’t noticed yet.
http://fungi.com/mycotech/farmwaste.html
8 swivelchair // Jul 28, 2009 at 8:40 am
FTM Thank you for taking an interest in this issue. Interesting how things are so democratized with blogs — issues that people think are important percolate up to the top whereas before it used to be top down. We’ll see if this issue goes anywhere.
Bioremediation like the fungi have got to be part of the answer.
I don’t know how this ties in with obesity, but I’d just like to see for once everyone who has information about obesity — cultural, nutritional, genetics, endocrine, environmental, food industry — sitting down at the table all at once and getting their story straight.
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