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Denis Giles

24 October 2016

Created: 24 October 2016

Last Updated: 24 October 2016

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By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

More than a decade ago, when the Government was putting green and red dots on vegetarian and non-vegetarian food, the milk industry, and hundreds of literate people, insisted that milk was vegetarian (even though it comes from an animal) and milk products should be listed with a green dot. We caved in.

Even people with a plant based diet will often admit that cheese is their weakness. Considering that cheese smells like dirty socks, why? Cheese is a high-calorie product loaded with fat, sodium, and cholesterol. Typical cheeses are 70 percent fat. And the type of fat they contain is mainly saturated (“bad”) fat, which increases your risk of heart disease and diabetes. Cheese is the number-one source of saturated fat in the Western diet. About one-third of adults, and 12.5 million children and adolescents, are obese in America. We should be very far behind – with a largely vegetarian diet and a penchant towards healthy meals at home - but we have also joined the ranks of obese nations. And obesity is a major cause of death through heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. In all three of these diseases we rank near the top.

One-fourth of an average, 12-inch, cheese pizza contains nearly 13 grams of fat, including 6 grams of saturated fat and 27 milligrams of cholesterol. An ounce of cheese contains 9 grams of fat, including 6 grams of saturated fat. Partly skimmed milk versions of cheeses have just slightly lower amounts of fat.

But we will continue to drink milk and eat cheese/paneer.

Now, many years later, I learn why people drink milk and eat paneer and cheese.  Not because it is necessary for you, or because Krishna drank it (which he didn’t). No, the reason why people insist on it is because it is an opiate.

You can get hooked onto cheese. There is a scientific reason. As milk digests, it produces mild opiates called casomorphins. In 1981, Eli Hazum, and his colleagues at Wellcome Research Laboratories, reported traces of the chemical morphine, an addictive opiate, in milk.

A casomorphin is a protein fragment derived from Casein, a milk protein. Casein is the major protein in the milk of all mammals.

The distinguishing characteristic of casomorphins is that they have an opioid effect. Opioids are among the world’s oldest known drugs. Opioids are well known for their ability to produce a feeling of well-being, calm, intense feelings of pleasure, followed by a drowsy feeling. Opiates are addictive.     Dependence can develop, leading to withdrawal syndromes if you stop at once.

Concentrated milk products, like cheese, ice cream, and milk chocolate, contain concentrated quantities of these addictive narcotics. (Incidentally, Casein is sometimes even added to certain dairy-free and vegan cheeses.) It takes 10 lbs of milk to make 1 lb of cheese. As milk is turned into cheese, most of its water is removed leaving behind concentrated casein and fat. So, concentrated dairy products, like cheese, have especially high levels of opiates, so the pleasure effect is greater. That is why, for instance, many people take a glass of milk at night. And why it is given to bridegrooms on the wedding night!

Why would mammals evolve to have opioids in their milk? Dr Neal Bernard, founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, explains, “It appears that the opiates from mother’s milk produce a calming effect on the infant and, in fact, may be responsible for a good measure of the mother-infant bond. Psychological bonds always have a physical underpinning. Like it or not, mother’s milk has a drug-like effect on the baby’s brain that ensures that the baby will bond with Mom and continue to nurse and get the nutrients all babies need. Like heroin or codeine, casomorphins slow intestinal movements and have a decided antidiarrheal effect. The opiate effect may be why adults often find that cheese can be constipating, just as opiate painkillers are.”

The European Food Safety Agency,  in response to a number of studies and public health concern, did a scientific literature review in 2009 to assess  how addicting casomorphins are, and whether or not enough of the casomorphins cross the intestinal wall and get into the blood stream and ultimately cross the blood-brain barrier, etc. Do casomorphines play a role in autism etc.? They are still studying the matter, because they cannot come to a conclusion on how much is alright for the human body.

However, this much we know: with opioid drugs, different people react differently to them and different amounts affect people differently. Further, it is generally accepted that binging on drugs on a daily basis is bad for us, even in sufficiently small quantities. Florida scientist, Dr. Robert Cade, has identified casomorphin as the probable cause of attention deficit disorder. Dr. Cade found Beta-casomorphin-7 in high concentrations in the blood and urine of patients with either schizophrenia or autism. Studies by Dr. Karl Riechelt, in Norway, indicate a very strong association between autistic behaviour, celiac disease, schizophrenia and ingestion of dairy. One research paper, from the University of Illinois, states, “Casomorphins possess opioid activity. The term, opioid, refers to morphine-like effects which include signs of sedation, tolerance, sleep induction, and depression.”

A recent case report entitled “Cow’s Milk-Induced Infant Apnea With Increased Serum Content Of Bovine Beta Casomorphin 5”, published in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition…“Infant apnea refers to when a baby stops breathing.” The researchers report “a case of a breast-fed infant with recurrent apnea episodes, which have always been preceded by his mother’s consumption of fresh cow’s milk.” Lab tests revealed a high level of casomorphin in the child’s blood, leading researchers to speculate that it was the “opioid activity that may have a depressive effect on the respiratory center in the central nervous system and induce a phenomenon called milk apnea.”

“The aim of the present report,” the paper concludes, “is to draw researchers’ attention to the possibility of occurrence of a systemic reaction with an apnea seizure on the infant’s exposure to the proteins in cow’s milk. We are convinced that such a clinical situation occurs rarely; however, it is accompanied by a real threat to the infant’s life that can be avoided when applying a simple and not costly dietetic intervention…a dairy-free diet”. As many as 1 in 10 infants, with recurrent apneic episodes, cannot be saved and die of SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome (also known as crib death). One in every two thousand babies dies this way. The researchers conclude: “Penetration of beta-casomorphins into the infant’s immature central nervous system may inhibit the respiratory center in the brainstem leading to abnormal ventilatory responses, hypercapnia [too much carbon dioxide], hypoxia [not enough oxygen], apnea, and death.”

Casomorphins are also accused of participating in the cause of other conditions, including type I diabetes, postpartum psychosis, circulatory disorders, food allergies, and autism.

 “In fact, gluten and dairy do act as drugs for many people” says immunologist and researcher Aristo Vojdani, PhD, MSc, MT, the CEO of Immunosciences Lab, Inc. in Beverly Hills, California. “Just as with the heroin or pain-pill addict, going off gluten or casein immediately can produce withdrawal symptoms”. Withdrawal symptoms include anger and depression.

By the way, as Casein breaks down in the stomach it also releases histamines. Histamine is a substance that plays a major role in many allergic reactions, dilating blood vessels and making their walls abnormally permeable. Histamines are released when foreign allergens are present (cold medicines, for instance, have antihistamines), which is also why 70% of the world’s population is allergic to dairy products

Nature's way is to make nursing pleasurable. That same mechanism is what also makes weaning so difficult. So many adults have never been weaned from the addictive effects of milk. Are you a drug addict?

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Denis Giles

03 October 2016

Created: 03 October 2016

Last Updated: 03 October 2016

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By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

When I started writing about animals, I thought I wrote to educate people so that they would become kinder and more scientific. Now I realize that I write as dancers and singers do, for myself. My admiration for the universe and all its creatures unfolds itself week by week. I write because I cannot help myself.

Imagine a world of tiny beings that is almost identical to ours. Where the dominant species mirrors every action of the human being – with far greater elegance, intelligence and success. Such a world exists – the world of ants.

I have written about them several times. They build tunnels and houses with engineering skills to monitor the weather, have castes and classes, go to war, pick up slaves that service them forever, keep guards outside their colonies, run farms and grow food for the colony in well organized and fertilized fields, run kitchens and messes where ants gather to eat, have bedrooms and cleaning services, make boats to cross rivers, train soldiers and workers and housemaids. They have classes with teachers. I can’t think of anything they don’t do that is like us – except better. I am sure if we had a machine to monitor their language we would find it as complex as our own with different languages in different colonies. I am sure we will discover what they do for amusement as well – imagine tiny projectors showing films!

Now a study, done by Clint Penick, a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University and co-lead author with researchers at Oxford and Arizona Universities of “A simple behavioural model predicts the emergence of complex animal hierarchies” published in The American Naturalist. shows the electoral process of ants and how different levels of society are formed.

When an Indian Jumping Ant colony’s queen dies the colony is thrown into disarray for some time, while the process for making the new queen and the new Darbar, the new hierarchy of Important Ants, goes on. It has the same murderous tense quality that our elections have. As the dust settles, the new hierarchies form.

When an queen dies her smell, which pervades the ant’s colony, stops. Workers, who are the bottom of the hierarchy and cannot have children (though they have reproductive systems), quickly gather at the centre of the colony and form a circle around the larvae and pupae. This is how it goes: “A single ant starts beating another ant’s head with its antennae, and in no time half the ants in the colony are engaged in antennal fencing duels. Slaps escalate to head biting, and ‘police’ ultimately intervene and restore order.”

The ants are beating each other up for only one reason: the top of the pecking order is the one who lays eggs and this fighting is to determine who gets to lay eggs and who doesn’t. And after months of conflict (where no one dies!) 10 to 15 top candidates emerge and they transform into gamergates; their brains shrink, their abdomens fill with ovaries and their expected lifespans grow from a maximum of six months, to up to five years. The group will equally share egg-laying power and pick up the late queen’s sceptre.

The new colony order is like ours, new layers of dominance formand, in this complex social arrangement, hierarchies form that are also seen in humans, dolphins and apes.

During the fighting, which is in the form of organized tournaments – just like the debates of the American candidates – the ants indulge in three behaviours: biting, policing and duelling with their antennae.

When the ants bite, they lock their jaws around the head of another ant, and the winner establishes its dominance. Dopamine levels change as a result of winning or losing, with winners getting a hormone boost that will give them an edge in the next confrontation, called the winner effect. It also activates their reproductive system, while, on the other hand, losers’ reproductive capabilities shut down.

As more ants drop out of the tournament, subordinate ants start “policing” less dominant ants that refuse to give up. Groups of five ants will restrain challengers for up to two days — enough time to bring the hormone down and remove the individual from the competition.

These gangs of subordinate ants have decided whom they want as their leader – the way party goondas do in villages.

Look at the difference – and predictability- of the results of the “election”. When ants only bit each other a hierarchy emerged that was more democratic and shared power — a bureaucratic structure of dominant individuals with a CEO at the top and power filtering by rank down to the intern worker queens or Gamergates.

When biting and strong policing were used, a dictatorship emerged — a single ant on top, with all other ants sharing the same rank of lowly workers, and the goonda ants formed the honour bodyguard. Does this sound familiar?

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Denis Giles

17 October 2016

Created: 17 October 2016

Last Updated: 17 October 2016

Hits: 1902

By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

In male humans, rape is hardly ever about sexual attraction. It is usually about finding someone physically weaker and more vulnerable and venting one’s anger against the world on them. That is why husbands mistreat their wives, teenage boys rape children, a Nirbhaya and a Jisha lose their lives horrifically, a girl is raped in Brazil by 33 men after being drugged. It might explain the tragic fact that NO country—however egalitarian, aware and wealthy —has been able to eliminate rape and violence against women. Sweden has more rapes than India. How can one explain that? The elimination of rape may only lie ultimately in the elimination of violence itself.

Male animals of some species do it too. But in this case it is not for the sake of violence. The purpose of life, in every species, is to beget life. Animals don’t have a shred of malice. So, violence on the female is either because she is in heat and he is so overcome by the pheromone smell that he cannot help himself, or because he is in a race with other males of his species to see that he continues his genetic legacy.

Female animals are discriminating. The male has to be good looking (the redder the Mandrill’s face, the likelier he is to get a mate), he has to be a good provider – birds have to woo their mates by building and decorating nests, getting food for the females, even dancing to show how virile they are - and he has to be a good defender and protector. Some females spread their bets by allowing themselves to be mated several times so that the offspring have different fathers.

But in some species the female is not allowed the luxury of choice.  Either by sheer force or by cunning, she is physically violated. One foul villain is the water strider. These insects walk on water. The female has a genital shield to protect herself from a marauding male. To get around that, the male forcibly mounts the female. If she protests and refuses to cooperate by removing her shield, he threatens her by striking the water with his legs. She knows this will immediately attract fish and other predators. She is underneath so she will get eaten while he will escape. Once she agrees to let him in, he will stop creating vibrations in the water. So, for her it is a choice of two evils and she gives in to the first to save her life.

Sea otters need a lot of food every day, approximately 25% of their body weight. When food is short, the male will sometimes snatch a random baby and hold it to ransom till the mother pays in food to the male.  They also rape baby seals. Male otters will find a juvenile harbour seal and mount it, as if he were mating with a female otter, which means holding the female’s head under water for a long time. This kills some female otters and certainly all the seal pups. Some abandon the pup when it dies. Others return to the corpse later and continue to violate it.  Male sea lions fight for a beach filled with females, but then this leaves lots of males on the side-lines with no females, they become extremely frustrated because they had to travel far to that beach for a chance at sex. They will often take it out on youngsters that stray from the group, beating them up and then raping them, usually killing them.

Bottlenose dolphin males form gangs, corner a female and then take turns mating with her. If there are no females around, they take a young male instead. Competing groups of dolphins may raid rival territories for their females. Studies in the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, on bottlenose dolphins in Western Australia showed that male dolphins formed alliances to guard the females of their group against rape – perhaps not so much chivalry and gallantry as restricting sexual access to their own “possessions”.

Professor Barbara Smuts of the University of Michigan and a long-time observer of social relations in primates such as hamadryas baboons, chimpanzees and orangutans describes, in Discover magazine, the masculine coercion of the female.

“…Sometimes, as I saw in Gombe (a wildlife reserve in Tanzania), a male chimpanzee even attacks an oestrous female days before he tries to mate with her. Goodall (Jane, a pioneering ethologist) thinks that a male uses such aggression to train a female to fear him so that she will be more likely to surrender to his subsequent sexual advances. Similarly, male hamadryas baboons, who form small harems by kidnapping child brides, maintain a tight rein over their females through threats and intimidation. If, when another male is nearby, a hamadryas female strays even a few feet from her mate, he shoots her a threatening stare and raises his brows. She usually responds by rushing to his side; if not, he bites the back of her neck. The neck bite is ritualized—the male does not actually sink his razor-sharp canines into her flesh—but the threat of injury is clear. By repeating this behaviour hundreds of times, the male lays claim to particular female months even years before mating with them. When a female comes into oestrus, she solicits sex only from her harem master, and other males rarely challenge his sexual rights to her.”

Would this be called rape – child marriage is definitely non-consensual sex. In some groups, when females form defensive alliances of their own, there is a marked drop in male violence.

Male scorpion flies prefer to provide their potential mates with food gifts of dead insects. But if there are absolutely none, the male rapes the female. Male scorpion flies have a so-called notal organ, a clamp that serves to keep unwilling females in a mating position. The males that resort to rape are usually smaller and less symmetric than males who woo the females with gifts. However, experiments reveal that all males will rape in an environment in which nuptial gifts are scarce. Which means, that scorpion flies possess the brain to choose both gifts and rape as mating tactics. Rape yields very little reproductive success and the females fight so vigorously, twisting their bodies in order to avoid contact so it’s basically making the best of a bad job. In sagebrush and camel crickets, rape is the work of the ultimate loser on the edge of society, small and deformed, he can spread his genes in no other way.

The white fronted bee-eater is a small, colourful bird who lives in colonies in Africa. Males and females form stable pairs who nest together year after year. But rape in the community is common, and if a female leaves her nest alone she will be chased by 1-12 male birds who, if they succeed in pinning her to the ground, jump on her at once and try to mate with her.  In fact, when a female leaves the nest she whistles loudly, so that if her husband is nearby he can escort her.  No bachelors form part of the rape posse- all married males on the prowl.

The lesser snowgoose also lives in colonies, but her state is much worse. Married males routinely attack nesting females. A female left alone for an instant will probably be assaulted, and is probably on her own because her husband has gone off to rape someone else. One attempt every few days is the norm.

The little brown bat is even more sexually deviant. When most bats are hibernating through the winter, hanging together in vast colonies, this bat works its way through raping male and female alike as they sleep.

Some species of male ducks and geese chase and have forcible sex with females. Mallard duck’s males and females pair off normally, but the males that don't manage to get mates form gangs and use their combined strength to go after lone females. It's known to biologists as a 'rape flight'. Often, a gang of three or four of them attacks a female duck, two holding her down while one enters her, sometimes resulting in her injury or death.

They are among the 3% of bird species whose males have phalluses big enough to insert into the vaginas of females, whether or not she consents. The cockscrew-like male sex organ can be as long as 16 inches. However researchers have established that females of these species have evolved complex genitalia to thwart unwelcome pregnancies.

Some vaginas have spiral channels that impede sex by twisting in the opposite direction to that of the male phallus. Others have as many as eight cul-de-sac pouches en route, that could prevent fertilisation by capturing unwelcome sperm. These features are only found in the species renowned for forced sex. All others have simple male and female genitalia. Control over reproduction alternates between the sexes. If the male develops a longer, more elaborate phallus to force copulation, females wrest back control by developing features to thwart males who rape by developing side chambers to hold sperm that is ejected later. The success of this design is proven by the fact that as many as one in three duck matings are rapes, but in nine out of ten of these the offending sperm is eliminated, so 97 percent of all duck offspring are the result of the choice of the mother.

If rape, like evil, could be isolated in the mind and manipulated by medical or psychiatric intervention, it would be easy to exorcise it. But it is immensely more difficult when it comes from a view that women are an essentially different type of species and therefore need a special kind of treatment – whether promoting gender sensitivity or using them as objects.

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Denis Giles

26 September 2016

Created: 26 September 2016

Last Updated: 26 September 2016

Hits: 1612

By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

Many years ago the chicken industry, faced with a backlash against all meats, hired an advertising agency. They came up with the word “white” meat. For years the industry has been attributing all sorts of benefits to chicken “white meat” – none of which are true. White is the same as red in every way – whether in cholesterol, oil or anything else that people want to avoid. But no matter what the scientists and food experts say, people will now continue to regard chicken as “aspirational” and good for their health.

The same goes for fish oil. Fish oil is now the third most widely used dietary supplement, after vitamins and minerals.

People have been told repeatedly by the advertisements, and by doctors paid by the industry, that fish oil has Omega 3 in it and these fatty acids will protect their hearts. Fish oil has also been sold as preventing heart disease or stroke, as well as for clogged arteries, chest pain, irregular heartbeat, bypass surgery, heart failure, rapid heartbeat, preventing blood clots, and high blood pressure after a heart transplant.

The problem is that most of the clinical trials, involving fish oil, have found no evidence of any of this. From 2005 to 2012, at least two dozen rigorous studies of fish oil were published in leading medical journals, most of which looked at whether fish oil could prevent heart disease, attacks or strokes in high-risk populations (obese, low exercise, meat eating, smokers, history of heart disease, high cholesterol, hypertension or Type 2 diabetes). Twenty of these studies found that fish oil had NO benefits at all.

In theory, fish oil supplements are rich in two omega-3 fatty acids — eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) — that could have a blood-thinning effect, much like aspirin, that could reduce the possibility of clots. Omega-3s can, in laboratory findings, also reduce inflammation, which plays a role in atherosclerosis. Supposedly they increase blood flow, reduce blood pressure and give neurons structural strength. Unfortunately these properties of omega-3 fatty acids don’t translate into any benefits in the human body. This is what all large clinical trials, involving thousands of people, have proven. A review in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), involving almost 70,000 people, found no compelling evidence linking fish oil supplements to a lower risk of heart attack, stroke or early death.

So where did this mythology, that has made so many companies rich and wasted so much consumer money, come from? Research was carried out in the 1970s by Danish scientists Dr. Hans Olaf Bang and Dr. Jorn Dyerberg, who decided that Inuits living in Greenland had low rates of cardiovascular disease and they attributed to an omega-3-rich diet consisting of fish, seal and whale blubber. This research was disproved by  Dr. George Fodor, a cardiologist at the University of Ottawa, who showed that Inuits had as much heart disease as any high risk population. But by then the fish oil industry was up and running!

In the 1990s an Italian study, which showed that fish oil was better than Vitamin E, was also exaggerated to bolster this theory.  It prompted the American Heart Association to endorse fish oil as a way for heart patients to get more omega-3s in their diets.

And so the sales shot through the roof all over the world, as heart patients sought the easy way – not to exercise and not to stop eating / drinking / smoking, but to take supplements of fish oil and lie back. According to Prof. Andrew Grey and Dr. Mark Bolland, at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the authors of a 2014 study on fish oil, “The sales are going up despite the progressive accumulation of trials that show no effect.”

Over the years similar findings have been published in the top-ranking internal medicine journals (New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA, PLoS Medicine, JAMA Internal Medicine, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine). If nothing else, doctors who read these journals should have stopped recommending fish oil. But sales in America alone went up from $425 million in 2007 to $1,043 million in 2012. The same sort of increase was found in the UK and Australasia (which includes us!) 10% Americans now take a daily pill of fish oil; Some because of the advice of doctors, others because of its ready availability, anecdotal evidence, supportive one sided “news” reports and selective presentations by the fish oil industry.

A clinical trial of 12,000 people, done by Dr. Gianni Tognoni of the Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2013, found that fish oil did not reduce the rate of death from heart attacks and strokes in people with evidence of atherosclerosis. “In fact, there has been a spate of studies showing no benefit,” said Dr. James Stein, the director of Preventive Cardiology at University of Wisconsin Hospital.

In contrast, doctors warn that fish oil can be dangerous when combined with aspirin or other blood thinners. It can lead to bruises and nose bleeds. Preston Mason of the Harvard Medical School talks about the danger of fish oil in a widely watched documentary made for FRONTLINE, Supplements and Safety. It comes down to oxygen, says Mason. Fish oil is extracted as a by-product from oily fish like anchovies. As the fish are crushed, they’re exposed to air, meaning the oil becomes oxidized. Oxidized fish oil contains oxidized lipids, which can trigger changes inside human cells that lead to health problems like cardiovascular disease. Prescription-grade fish oil needs to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, notes Mason, and because the approval process comes with stringent production standards, the risk of oxidation runs low. However, in Mason’s work and in other previously published studies, researchers have found that the type of fish oil that’s sold in stores often has high levels of oxidation.

In the early 2000s the fish oil market began to soar because of the favourable recommendations of the influential American Heart Association. When the association was asked for an expert to explain the recommendation, former AHA president Robert Eckel, said that the recommendation needs to be revised. “It would be a good time for that to be updated,” Eckel said. “Almost all studies of fish oil supplements show no benefit. I really feel this remains unproven.”

In the 1990s, a study came out in Wales linking fish oil intake with a longer life. In 2003, some of the researchers, who conducted the early and influential study, published the results of a follow-up. Of 3,000 Welsh men with angina — a chest pain caused by coronary heart disease — some were advised to eat oily fish or take fish oil supplements. This time they found that the fish group patients were more likely to die, and the researchers said it was particularly worse for those taking the fish oil pills. “The excess risk [of cardiac death] was largely located among the subgroup given fish oil capsules,” they reported.

 So, while fish oil will not help remove your possibilities of heart attack, it may actually propel you towards one!

Sometimes I wonder why I should write these articles. What does our Drug Controller General of India do?

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