You have read it in black and white: the economy is improving: Factories are hiring. Adding 200,000 jobs in December cut the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent. Consumer confidence is rising, and cars are selling again.

Meanwhile, corporate profits hit a record $2-trillion a year, and since the cataclysm in 2008, real gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services, has grown for more than two years.

These economic measures are broad, ubiquitous and reliable, but there are other ways to measure the economy. If you poke around, you’ll find economists — on Wall Street and Elm Street alike — with their own idiosyncratic economic indicators.

Like the GDP and unemployment rate, many are less forecasting tools than measures of the current economy. That may diminish their prognostic value, but not their human-humorous-interest value.

To stay or to vacate?

Vacations, however necessary, can be expensive, and so when the economy tanked in 2008, we began to hear about the cost-cutting “staycation.” By taking time off from work (assuming we had a job…) without leaving home, we could enjoy friends, family and local attractions: parks, museums, lakes and beaches.

We could, in other words, enjoy many of the benefits of a vacation while ducking the hefty price tag. Staycations can have pizazz: would you rather be taking off your shoes in a frenetic airport or building a tree house with the kids?

We failed to find anybody who studies staycations, so the best we can say about their merit as economic indicators is that past performance is no guarantee of future success; read the full prospectus before investing!

Vacant at home

It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to deduce from foreclosure stats or photos of abandoned houses that housing remains a black hole in the American economy. But like the staycation, a foreclosure boom follows a sour economy, and is more informative about the immediate past than about the immediate future.

We were, however, intrigued to learn that foreclosure could be a disease vector. Clouds of mosquitoes are breeding in abandoned ponds and swimming pools at foreclosed homes in Arizona.

That gives us another reason to hate skeeters, even if their whine is the sound of love.

Sports: No rush to the finish line

Pro-sport tickets are not cheap, so a full stadium must signify a healthy economy. But it ain’t necessarily so, says Andrew Billings, who studies broadcasting and sports at the University of Alabama. “People often get a flawed picture from simply going by attendance figures. It depends on the sport.”

In the National Football League, he notes, “the majority of stadiums sell out, and demand far exceeds supply.” Before a sick economy leads to empty seats, he says, it deflates ticket prices on resale markets, “but you will still see a full stadium, and may think the economy must not be too bad, even if the demand is cut in half.”

And don’t bother counting duffers at a private golf course, either, Billings says. A full golf course “is not always a straight-off indicator of prosperity,” because the major expense is the cost of membership. “For many people, once they have bought the membership, the costs are sunk, and golf becomes the cheap option for entertainment.”

When money is tight, he says, “They may be playing twice as frequently because it’s already paid for.”

Big screen, big sales, bogus economic indicator?

You might think sales of pricy electronic goods, including those “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” TVs, would closely track prosperity, but Billings says they “may be another misleading measure.”

Many of those giant video screens, more suited to aircraft hangers than living rooms, are bought to watch sports, and looking at the full economic picture reveals the folly of the sales = prosperity equation, he says.

Consider the cost of season tickets for big-league sports — up to $20,000 for a seat behind home plate at the New York Yankees. When times get bad, Billings says, “The buyer may think, ‘Why don’t I get a $2,000 TV and the major-league baseball package? Once you add in parking and food, sports can be very expensive, and that makes the flat screen look pretty cheap.”

Although another flat-screen sale may contribute to the image of prosperity, Billings says, this fan “has really cut their budget to avoid going to the stadium.”

Pretty Byzantine?

How do we get a measure of economic activity in the long, dark epoch before the invention of the GDP or the flat-screen television? In the 14th century, during the death throes of the Byzantine empire, the church was an economic engine and a wealth center. If you bought a marriage license, you paid the church, which also owned buildings, even entire communities.

Because churches hold some of the best documents from the period, some scholars have proposed using records of church wealth as a proxy for economic development — or decline — during this benighted epoch before the spreadsheet was envisioned.

Garbage everywhere

With the possible exception of unwrapped broccoli from a local farm, everything you buy creates garbage, and the garbage disposal system is always affected by economic slowdowns.

Duh.

But we were surprised to hear that garbage can offer almost a real-time economic readout. According to Edward Humes, author of the forthcoming book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, “Until the housing bubble burst, the largest landfill in the country, by intake, was Puente Hills in Los Angeles County, which was taking up to the legal limit, 13,000 tons per day. This was cut in half after the housing bubble burst. Home construction and demolition debris fell as construction stopped, and people started buying less stuff.”

Construction fell so quickly, Humes says, that “Landfill operators probably saw [bad economic] things coming ahead of a lot of the rest of us.”

Even “durable goods” can quickly start bulking up the garbage stream, he says. “So much of what we buy is pretty ephemeral, even the stuff defined as durable goods must last just one year. A lot of it is designed to be thrown away; not fixed. The age of the TV repairman is long behind us.”

Garbage tells us about more than just economics, Humes adds. “It’s a little scary, one of our greatest exports is trash. We used to make things, and now we make trash.”

Although high garbage flows correlate to prosperity, Humes says the linkage cannot last forever. “Every culture figures out” that wasting resources is not a long-term solution, he says. “Suddenly, when resources are scarce, humans get more conscious of how much they have wasted, but by then it’s too late.”

Night lights, big city

Can lights at night, as seen from space, measure a region’s economy? After all, lighting requires bulbs, generators, energy and wires, so the argument has face validity. But a 2011 study returned mixed results. Night lights were a useful gauge in 25 percent to 33 percent of counties in the United States (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). In India, night lights gave a useful picture of local GDP in a “very small number” of districts.

And in China, fewer than 10 percent of districts showed a significant correlation between night lights and GDP. One reason: light from the intense coastal urbanization overwhelmed the satellite’s sensors and could not be measured accurately.

Underwater underwear

Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve for oh-so-many years, was said to favor sales of men’s underwear as an economic indicator. His theory: When times get tight, men decide to forgo the pleasure of a new pair of briefs or boxers.

We were unable to unearth evidence for this notion, but wish to ask two follow-up questions: Do sales of women’s underwear convey an economic message? And how do you know?

Stick with lipstick?

If men can withstand the urge to buy boxers and briefs, women apparently can’t cut back on “small indulgences” like lipstick. In 2001, the chair of Estee Lauder coined “lipstick index” to explain why lipstick sales rise during a bad economy.

Going to war

For some, the military is a job of last resort, and so the number and quality of new recruits offers a proxy for economic conditions.

But military recruiting ads may be just as telling as the numbers. In 2009, the New York Times described a new Marines ad showing “men crawling through mud and under barbed wire, being smacked in the head with padded fighting sticks, vomiting after inhaling tear gas and diving, boots and all, into a swimming pool.”

With so many potential recruits in the job market, the ad didn’t bother soft-selling the rigors of Marine life.

Recouping the coupons

When pressed for coins, why not cash in on those coupons that clutter mailboxes and newspapers? In hard times, coupon redemptions do rise, according to a company that processes them.

Skirting the economic reality?

If we can believe QI, a quiz show from the United Kingdom, long hair and short skirts are both signs of prosperity. Hey, we tried, but failed, to track this revelation back to a legit study, but still give thanks to reader “St Ga” for the suggestion, and for an elegant mix-mastering of cause and effect: “If the government makes short skirts & long hair compulsory for EVERYONE will the economy improve? :)”

We wish.

Forget that secret childhood crush, forget those teenage indiscretions you posted on Facebook and cannot escape.

Is this your deepest secret — that you actually look forward to the holidays?

Lucky you. For the rest of us, we’re stuck on those holiday-stress media fretlines: over-drinking, under-sleeping and indecent exposure to idiotic in-laws.

Not to mention getting mauled at the mall.

These “Beware: awful-holidays ahead” warnings make little sense to us. Sure, there’s relentless pressure to consume — material goods, foods and alcohol alike. And even if the buy! pressure has intensified (did 24/7 coverage of Black Friday mean it was more important than killing Osama Bin Laden?), those holiday-stress headlines are nothing new.

And if the holidays are so horrid, why do we still have them?

In other words, what have Christmas, Hanukah and New Year’s and Kwanzaa done for us lately?

Maybe not so awful after all?

Because holidays are not (yet?) considered psychological disorders, they get less study than, say, post-traumatic stress disorder or autism. Still, The Why Files rounded up some experts — mainly positive psychologists — to discuss the upside of the holidays.

Holidays can be a spur to beneficial changes, says Robert McGrath, coordinator of student mind/body wellness services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  ”The disruption to routine that they create can serve as an opportunity to change.  For example, if you’ve been meaning to catch up with a friend for months, the holidays may help bring that deeper priority to the surface.”

The tradition of cooking and distributing sweets can serve as an excuse to walk over to see neighbors we always intend to visit. And New Years resolutions can become a socially sanctioned reason to make beneficial changes to diet, exercise, social involvement or volunteerism.

Rituals, religious and otherwise

However, much of the power of holidays is embodied in things that don’t change, says Lee Ann de Reus, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University in Altoona. “One thing we know about healthy families is that they incorporate rituals, and that certainly comes with holidays, no matter what your tradition.”

Rituals, she says, can range all over the map, from attending religious services like midnight mass to holding ceremonial feasts at the same house, or eating the same foods, prepared by the same family cooks.

De Reus solicits examples from her students, and says, “Some open all their gifts on Christmas eve, some open one on Christmas eve and everything else next morning. Families may have traditions about who they invite for Hanukah or who takes part in ceremonies around the dinner table.”

Many traditions are unique and whimsical, de Reus adds. “In one family, everybody gets a new set of pajamas, and wears them to open gifts. They may watch a specific film or stay up all night playing Trivial Pursuit. And a lot of traditions revolve around food preparation.”

Reading ritual

Rituals are not just about repetition, de Reus says. “We know that ritual gives multiple things. It’s a way to transmit values, it’s a way to reconnect in a meaningful way, and it brings families together, even families that don’t necessarily get along outside the holidays.”

After a divorce, she says, tradition can temporarily trump animosity. “The parents may put their differences aside; they may come together for the sake of the children.”

College students from families that have split up “often can work it out, spending Christmas eve with one part of the family, and Christmas day with the other part,” says McGrath “But when it has not been worked out, they must choose to be with one parent, and the other one can feel very hurt.”

Ritual also provides a chance for a family to reconnect with its history, de Reus says. “If I ask college age students about their favorite memories about growing up, you can bet the majority are going to talk about some sort of event, memory, probably involving a ritual, often around a holiday or a birthday.”

Ritual, de Reus says, “tells us what are we about, helps a family to regain its center. Maybe they have strayed from these values, are too caught up in consumerism, materialism. It takes an assertive parent to push back against the larger societal pressures that exist around holidays: drinking, overindulgence, mass consumerism. I think we totally underestimate the value and importance of ritual in family life.”

Total togetherness

Holidays bring together many of the most important people in our lives, and, as McGrath points out, researchers regularly find a strong relationship between happiness and time with family and friends, “especially if the gathering is for positive reasons rather than to deal with problems. In terms of the positive experience, just being with people is the key. I don’t know that people come back from the holidays and say, ‘I did not get a good present.’”

The good-will that comes from these gatherings need not end with the holidays, McGrath says. “A positive note is to realize that you can enjoy those same activities daily: eat meals mindfully and enjoy them, have fun with friends and family, share stories, and practice giving often.”

What do you expect?

Part of the holiday-blues problem may exist in excessive expectations, says Leaf Van Boven, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado. “There are very clear cultural stereotypes for what ought to happen at the holidays, for how people will behave, for gifts that will be exchanged. For most people, the holidays don’t meet that expectation, so there can be a sense of disappointment, but that is very different from saying we don’t actually enjoy ourselves.”

And while holidays can be times of reduced stress, “That’s not to say no stress, which is often the expectation,” says Van Boven. “For most people, holidays involve spending time with close others, family and friends.” Sure, those relationships can carry their own challenges, “but most people enjoy spending time with friends and family more than they do spending time at work.”

Money can’t buy me love

The pressure to buy, Buy! BUY!! can be a major source of holiday stress, but a growing body of evidence shows that ’tis truly “better to give than to receive.” In a 2008 study, Elizabeth Dunn, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, gave college students either $5 or $20, and directed them to spend it on themselves, or on a charitable donation or a gift by 5 p.m.

That night, the students who gave away the money reported a higher level of happiness, and the real kicker was being with the beneficiary, Dunn adds. “We did not say you have to give it and walk away. A lot of people took a friend for lunch or bought a toy for a younger sibling.”

The curious thing is that this preference does not operate at the conscious level, Dunn says. Most people think that it make them happier to receive $20 to spend on themselves, she says. “It’s not that they love to give, but when we give them those amounts to spend on someone else, they are more happy.”

For a 2010 study,¹ Dunn put players through a game that allowed them to donate money to another player, and found that the stingy players had less positive emotions, more negative emotions, and higher levels of both shame and stress hormones.

Not so bad after all?

If we’re getting the picture that giving reasonable gifts and hanging out with friends and family make the holidays less painful than medieval dentistry, that’s the message we got from a rare study of Christmas happiness. In 2002, Tim Kasser of Knox College (Illinois) found that a 57 percent of a small sample said Christmas was not stressful.

That, Kasser told us by email, is still a “reasonably high level of stress … around the midpoint of the scale.” Women and people who focused on spending had higher levels of stress.

Yet Christmas may still be “merry,” Kasser wrote. “While levels of life satisfaction and negative emotions were more or less the same as what people report at other times of the year, people do report somewhat higher levels of pleasant emotions during Xmas.”

The study² found more satisfaction among people who focused on family time and took part in religious activities, and less among those who focused on consumption.

“It seems that connecting with others and with something ‘bigger than yourself’ promotes higher levels of well-being; that’s consistent with past research, as is the finding the materialism undermines well-being,” Kasser wrote. “It is not much fun to be fighting the crowds and most research shows that shopping is rarely an inherently engaging and interesting activity.”

(You’ve got to) Accentuate the positive

All of these observations seem to explain why the winter holidays have survived the headlines about holiday horrors. “The big three holidays are good ways of maximizing those things that we tend find most enjoyable, and probably go a long way toward explaining why they are so powerful emotionally, why they persist,” says Van Boven.

One way to cut holiday stress, Van Boven says, “Is to think about what we value in the holidays, what really matters, and then try to behave in way that reflects those values. Often that kind of exercise can be extremely transformative, will get you out of the gift-giving rat race, and more toward the development of social engagement.”

Dunn adds that giving can be more emotionally satisfying when it involves personal contact. “When you have the opportunity to give so you can see the positive impact, that’s when the potential happiness benefit of Christmas giving is greatest. If your mother-in-law loves pedicures, you could buy her a gift certificate, but I think the research shows that it’s better to make the appointment and go with her. That’s the critical piece. If you can turn the gift into an opportunity for social connection, that’s going to maximize the benefit.”

With little notice until recently, a shortage of medicine is starting to impair treatment at America’s hospitals. Common, cheap and necessary drugs needed to fight bacteria or cancer, to ease pain or to nourish premature infants are running out.

Many of these meds are injectables, which must be made under sterile conditions. All are generics, which sell for pennies compared to the buck-buster drugs that feed the bottom lines at the big-name drug companies.

Most shortages are unnanounced until a wholesaler’s shipment arrives lacking an ordered drug. “It’s unbelievable,” says Sara Shull, manager of the drug policy program at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics in Madison. “Today I was trying figure out alternatives to papaverin,” an old drug used to prevent spasm in the many surgeries that involve grafting a blood vessel. “We have identified some alternatives, and I am now I working with the surgeon to figure out how to dose them, how to apply them. Is it bathed on? Sprayed on? He’s busy, we’re all busy, and sorting this all out takes a lot of time. The continual need to find replacements gives me a headache.”

Shortage-induced substitution played a role in Alabama, where nine hospital patients were killed by intravenous nutrients this summer, says Allen Vaida, executive vice president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a non-profit that targets medicine hazards. “Because of a shortage, this compounding pharmacy was making a product from raw material, and it got a bacterial contamination.” (The maker of the nutrient solution, Meds IV pharmacy in Birmingham, Ala., is apparently out of business.)

Medications on this rack will restock a robot that fills individual patient envelopes that will be sent tomorrow to nurses’ stations in the hospital. Actually, the robot restocks itself in its 24/7 delivery of thousands of prescription drugs.

Photo: The Why Files

ENLARGE

Source: U.S. House of Representatives

Shortages are growing, especially for injectable medicines.

Running long on shortages

Pharmacists have always had to find substitute medicines, as patients keep coming through the door, but Vaida cites Food and Drug Administration numbers to argue that shortages are now at “crisis” proportions. “The FDA shows 70 shortages in 2006, 129 in 2007 and last year, there were 211. So far this year, we are already above 200 shortages, and the year isn’t done. Shortages have been around forever, but they have never reached this number.”

Some drugs can be substituted, says Vaida, but “especially with chemotherapy and nutritional products, it’s not like are three alternatives for some medications, as there are with blood-pressure drugs. Some chemotherapies are specific for certain cancers, and if they are not available, you may have no alternative or [you] may have to use a third-line alternative.”

The pharmaceutical situation has never been more complicated, with more than 45,000 prescription drug products on the market, from about 1,400 manufacturers. Although we could not easily find numbers, drug shortages are also rising in the United Kingdom, where the supply situation is complicated by the restriction on exports within the European Union.

Shortages have many possible causes, but because manufacturers tend to be closed-mouthed, it’s not clear which problems are most momentous or easiest to solve:

How short is short?

A drug is considered “short” if a specific dosage and formulation is unavailable, and in some cases, a similar item can be substituted. But Shull says that’s still a problem in a big hospital. If a product that is normally purchased in a pre-loaded syringe is only available in a vial, University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics can no longer send a “unit of dose” to the nurse, and “that’s what the nurses are expecting,” Shull says.

Changing procedures complicate care and raise costs, Shull adds. “All our people are working in a complex system, with lives on the line. These shortages can be a recipe for increased errors.” Her hospital must dedicate one staffer to securing supplies of the common blood-thinner heparin, she says. Searching for alternate sources is less rewarding than studying the efficacy of various medication treatments, she adds. “It’s not what I was taught in pharmacy school, but when your back is up against the wall, you have no other options.”

Beyond impairing patient care, shortages have also become a major burden in medical research. Tests of new medicines, often set up to run at several hospitals nationwide, must give standardized meds to the treatment and control groups, and chaos can result when the drugs become unavailable. “These shortages are now affecting clinical trial options for patients with cancer,” Robert DiPaola, director of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health on Sept. 23. “Due to the uncertainty of being able to obtain many of these drugs, enrollment of patients on clinical trials has been delayed or stopped in several of our trials.”

Howard Koh, assistant secretary of health and human services, reinforced that message to the committee: “Many of the cancer drugs in short supply … are mainstays of the anti-cancer arsenal, and were largely developed through federally funded research begun 20, 30, even 40 years ago. They are still essential to treatment and research,” he said. The National Cancer Institute is currently sponsoring 349 clinical trials that require these drugs, Koh added. “Taken together, these studies represent thousands of patients, as well as a significant federal investment in clinical trials research.”

At the same hearing, Mike Alkire, chief operating officer of Premier healthcare alliance, told Congress how widespread the shortages have become. In a recent Premier survey, 53 percent of hospital pharmacists said they had faced at least six shortages “that had the potential to cause a medication safety issue or an error in patient care.” And 34 percent of respondents said at least six shortages had “resulted in a delay or cancellation of a patient-care intervention.”

Premier estimates that the 2,500-plus non-profit U.S. hospitals in its membership pay an extra $66 million per year due to these shortages — which translates to $415 million at all U.S. hospitals.

Market going gray?

When the usual sources run dry, hospital pharmacists often get emails, faxes and phone calls from the “gray market,” sources outside the usual supply chain. In the summer of 2011, the Institute for Safe Medication Practices surveyed 549 hospitals and found that:

Alkire, of the Premier alliance, told Congress that the gray market is “appalling,” with an average markup of 650 percent. Forty-five percent of the offers were marked up at least 1,000 percent above normal price, and drugs for leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma were marked up 4,000 percent. “We saw similar markups for medicines for sedation during surgeries; to dilate veins and prevent brain or heart spasms; and to prevent damage during a heart attack,” Alkire said.

For these reasons, University Hospital at UW-Madison does not buy gray, says Shull, although it does buy from a wholesaler that seems to have supplies of drugs when nobody else does.

The gray market arouses suspicion: How do some firms know about shortages before anybody else? How do they obtain drugs when normal sources are short?

“There is speculation going on,” says Vaida. “Some secondary wholesalers may try to buy up some available drugs and sell them for higher prices. Often times, they are looking for people who need the product, and try to obtain it from whatever sources. Some are playing it almost like Wall Street, anticipating what may go on shortage — if two manufacturers have just consolidated, and there’s a generic product that is only going to be made by one of them.”

Cures for missing meds

Many measures have been proposed to ease the medication shortage:

Photo: Armin Kübelbeck

Generic, injectable drugs comprise the majority of shortages.

The FDA seems to be getting the message. In testimony to the subcommittee on Sept. 23, Koh claimed that the agency had already headed off 99 looming shortages in 2011, compared to 38 for all of 2010. But Koh added that today’s shortages “include standard therapies for the treatment of lung, breast, ovarian, testicular and colorectal cancers, as well as several types of lymphomas and leukemias.”

Sometimes, Koh said, common-sense, proven measures can sidestep shortages. “… the FDA was able to mitigate a shortage by allowing the use of a filter to safely remove foreign particles contained within vials of injectable drugs, averting the obvious risk to patients of having metal shavings or other particulate matter injected into their veins.”

A pessimist, of course, could say the higher number of averted shortages simply reflects the greater number of shortages overall.

At any rate, organizations concerned with shortages say they are in a vise. “From our members’ perspective, it’s become [a] crisis,” says Hill. “We are seeing shortages nationwide. We have been tracking this for about 10 years, but in the last few years, we’ve seen a spike in the numbers.”

Given the problem’s multiple and sometimes obscure, roots, Hill sees “no single solution, and that’s the troublesome part. Unfortunately we will be dealing with this for a while. But there are some things we can do. We’d like to establish a mandatory early-warning system, so a manufacturer that has a problem has to notify the FDA. The FDA says it has avoided 99 shortages in the past year when it had that information. When there are multiple sources, the FDA can reach out to other manufacturers and urge them to ramp up production.”

David J. Tenenbaum

Each year, as influenza season approaches, medical authorities must scramble to predict which strains of flu will be most important, and then to grow enough vaccine to inoculate the population. Why does this take so much time, and what are some alternative strategies that might speed the process?

Find the article:

Flu vaccine shortage

Discussion Questions

1. Discuss: How does the influenza virus benefit from having so many strains?
2. What are the key steps in the process for identifying and making flu vaccine?
3. How have scientists proposed to speed up this process?
4. What is the meaning of the “H” and “N” in the virus designations, and how do they help explain the activity of a virus?
5. How is a virus different from a bacterium?
6. Why is influenza so deadly in some years, and not others?

Lesson Plans/Activities

1. Bird flu, swine flu, ferret flu? The flu can be spread between all sorts of creatures. Explore the NCBI Influenza database to find out what kinds of animals have been the source of flu outbreaks. What factors cause diseases to spread from animals to humans?
2. Facebook status: Outbreak! Follow this lesson plan that teaches about epidemiology and contagious diseases using social media.
3. The flu through time. Have students research previous flu pandemics, such as the deadly 1918 outbreak. Have students identify the similarities and differences between these pandemics, including the specific strains of the flu and the symptoms they produced. Aside from vaccines, how can people help prevent the spread of the flu?

We guess you could call that a failure, but Diana Nyad’s 29-hour quest to swim from Cuba to Florida was called on account of shoulder pain, waves and asthma. But no matter how disappointed Nyad may have been, we’re impressed.

Jolted by the thought that a 61-year old would jump into the ocean to embark on a 103-mile swim, we looked around and saw a mushrooming number of insanely hard runs, swims, triathlons and bike rides — and spotted a trend.

In running, ultra-endurance events are defined as longer than the 26-mile marathon. In cycling, longer than the 100-mile century. There’s no set definition in swimming, so far as we can tell, but Australia’s 19.7 kilometer, open-ocean Rottnest Channel Swim, has to qualify. The race had 173 solo entrants in 2011, up from 100 in 2001.

While the rest of us may wonder what it takes to run 26 miles or ride 100, ultra-athletes don’t stop with such paltry challenges. The Ironman triathlon, which features a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and 26 mile run, once seemed intense, the far end of endurance.

No longer. The ultra-bikathons include Wisconsin’s Dairyland Dare, which maxes out at 180 miles of hills.

And from there, things get worse. Much worse. The Tour de France bike race is one of three “grand tours” that normally exceed 2,000 miles in length. There’s the Furnace Creek 508, which bikes non-stop across 508 miles of Death Valley and the Mojave Desert.

And there’s the Race Across America, an annual, coast-to-coast sufferfest where sleep is optional and minimized, and where the bikers sometimes use duct tape or bungee cords to hold their heads up.

France has a triple-Ironman, and Africa has the Marathon des Sables, a gritty, six-day, 155-mile jog ‘n slog through the Sahara Desert.

Once a year, you can swim around Manhattan. It’s only 28 miles, and we hear raw sewage has stopped spewing into the Hudson River…

So we got to wondering. How (and why?) do these athletes attempt the near-impossible? Are the barriers physical — or mental? What are the rewards – and what are the risks of attempting such outlandish performance?

Why – the motivation question

Let’s start with the hardest question. Why in the world would anyone attempt these distances without being paid for it? “There are extremists in all activities,” says Ronnie Carda, a marathoner who heads the physical education activity program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “These are very committed individuals. Everyone looks at it as challenge, but most have a real love for it. I had a good friend who used to do ultra-endurance runs, absolutely loved it. But I assume there are people who get obsessed, and I have talked to some who have tried double Ironmans [swim 4.8. miles, bike 224 and run 52] and said one was enough.”

“Certain people, personalities, have to keep proving things to themselves,” says Bob Mazzeo, an associate professor of kinesiology and applied physiology at the University of Colorado, who studies high-altitude athletes.

“People ask, why am I doing this, and I say why do people climb Mt. Everest or do any other tough athletic endeavor?” says Charles Olson, who rode the Furnace Creek 508 last year under the nickname Brooklyn Beast. “It’s to see if you can. I was doing the Ironman, but it wasn’t enough. I’ve always been interested to see how far I could push things, including myself. As a child, I had slot cars and model trains, would see how fast they would go until they fell off the tracks or the engines would burn out.”

Finally, there’s the age factor. Ultra sports are made for older folks, says David Tanner, 61, who has completed Ironmans, the Race Across America (RAAM) and other ultra rides, swims and runs. “I have been around ultras in a lot of different sports, and most competitors weren’t superfast when they were 20. This is an opportunity for people who have perseverance and a good mental attitude to do well in a sport where they weren’t maybe fast enough when they were younger. In an ultra-marathon, sometimes the older you are, the wiser you are, and wisdom is more important than a high VO₂ max or muscle mass.”

VO₂ max measures the amount of oxygen a person can take in; higher levels allow greater athletic performance.

Tanner, a research associate at the Indiana University Human Performance Lab, added one more reason to push the limits. “Everything in your life can be going down the tubes, but you can enter an ultra, forget your problems for a day or two, finish dead last, and still feel good about yourself. It all comes down to self-satisfaction and personal achievement.”

Evolution ‘r us

This outburst of ultra-athleticism may amount to a return to our evolutionary roots, says Joel Stager, in the department of kinesiology at Indiana University. “There is a lot of evidence that humans may be some of the best endurance athletes on the planet, that we evolved to out-endure most animals.”

This excellence shows up in the most basic measurement of metabolic capacity, the volume of oxygen that can be delivered to the muscles per unit time. “Humans have a high value for VO₂ max per kilogram of body weight,” Stager says. “We have the ability to out-metabolize, and the ability to run long distances at a relatively modest pace, so if you put those together, we can out-endure most other species.”

What must training accomplish?

Training for an endurance sport has both emotional and physical goals, and while each event has its particular needs, the focus is on high-endurance, slow-contracting muscles.

Physically, training for an ultra-endurance event should:

Tanner says one of the biggest improvements in endurance athletics concerns nutrition. “Most of us used to make do with homemade brews, whatever you could get in real food. Today, so many companies engineer food that is specifically designed for endurance. You do need protein during a long event, people did not think that before. We have products that are more easily digestible, so you can get close to matching your caloric intake to your output.”

Not just a body game

Sources differed on whether ultra-endurance sports are tougher on the mind or the body, but there is no question that a multi-day race can tax the willpower. Having swum 10 miles or run 50 – do you have what it takes to swim another 10 or run another 50 to reach the finish line?

Training eases the inevitable confrontation with the pain and suffering of a long event, says Olson. “There are tough times in training. Last summer, I would be training 18 hours a day, would leave at 4:45 a.m., and on such a long day, it’s a struggle to find places to eat and drink.”

Olson, who trains in all weather, says “Through the training, you are learning how to deal with adversity.”

Mind control also helps during a race, Olson adds. “When you start getting negative, you have to be cognizant of that, typically you are getting hungry or thirsty, or your mind is playing tricks on you to get you to stop. I eat, change my cadence, or take a five-minute break; do what I need to do to get my mind back in synch. I tell myself I don’t want to let my children down, try to set an example, show that you can do anything you put your mind to.”

How to train

If the goals of training are clear, there’s no clear agreement on what it takes to reach them. Just as carbo loading in preparation for a long race faded 30 years ago, training hours are also on the wane, says Tanner. “Some people thrive on a massive amount of training, but most ultras are not doing the mileage we were 20 years ago. For [the 1989] RAAM, I was training 600 miles a week. I think most people now do not do that much, they substitute quality, hills, intervals, time trials, indoor efforts. There is whole lot more science to training.”

The nature of the training depends on the goal. “There is a huge difference between the people who are competing for the trophy versus the people who are out there for the challenge of going the distance,” says Carda of Wisconsin. “I can’t tell you the number of people that do an Ironman and don’t have a whole lot of intention of running much in the marathon.” Instead, many people many walk a large section of the marathon, which concludes the event. “It’s more about going the distance.”

And those differences affect the training, Carda adds. “If I’m going to compete, there has to be an intensity element. If your goal is strictly a finish, to meet the challenge of the distance, [you will use a different training routine]. It really depends on what your goals are.”

But even a moderate training schedule for, say, an Ironman or a 100-mile foot race will be intense – and time-consuming. Many ultras “are very good time managers,” says Carda. “One gentleman I know who does the Ironman annually found a way to train on an hour a night during the week, and went for long ride on the weekend.” Another would start a 100-mile bike ride at 5 a.m. Saturday, then met his wife and kids at a park. “They would have lunch and he’d be finished for the day. He found a way to put his family into it.”

Running risks

Even in sports that require an extraordinary physical effort, it’s possible to overdo it, says Mazzeo, who focuses on high-altitude athletic performance. “At Pikes Peak, in August, they have a half-marathon, starting at 8,000 feet, up to the summit at 14,000 feet. The next day, there’s a full marathon, up and down, and there are people who run both of them. That is crazy.”

The result of too much exertion, day after day, is called staleness or over-training syndrome, and the symptoms include lowered performance, sleep disturbances, unusual muscle soreness and a feeling of heaviness, even depression. These symptoms are “pretty common here in Colorado, with many triathletes training twice a day for six or seven days a week,” says Mazzeo. “Full-blown over-training syndrome can take a year for recovery, it’s quite significant.”

Ultra-endurance sports can hurt. Bikers can suffer neck seizures and genital numbness, or crash. Runners injure feet, joints and soft tissue.

And there is some evidence linking regular, long-term exertion with atrial fibrillation, a sometimes permanent heart-rhythm abnormality. “Endurance sport practice increases between 2 and 10 times the probability of suffering atrial fibrillation, after adjusting for other risk factors,” according to a 2008 study.¹ This surprising rate of atrial fibrillation may be due to genetics, changes in heart structure or inflammation.

And benefits

And what are the pay-offs of such exertion? We’ve all seen research showing manifold benefits of regular physical activity, and we have to suspect that many apply to ultra-athletes. “When we look at people who have maintained a highly active lifestyle for decades, we don’t find a lot of downsides,” says Indiana’s Stager. “They have lower blood pressure, lower heart rate, less body fat, and muscle mass, better cardiopulmonary performance, more heart capacity, and more elasticity of the arteries.”

High-level exercise helps the brain’s ability to think and make decisions. According to a 2010 ³ review of exercise in older adults, “A relatively high level of physical activity was related to better cognitive function and reduced risk of developing dementia; however, there were mixed results of the effects of exercise interventions on cognitive function indices.”

Stager says that in an ongoing study, the cerebellum, a part of the brain that is involved in voluntary motion, “appears to have a greater mass, more cells and more connectivity. As we age, we start having balance and gait problems that lead to falls and injury. What if we found that one hour of exercise a day would offset as many as 20 years of aging, which is what we appear to be finding?”

“There are some pretty surprising” results, Stager says. “The message for years was that the brain wasn’t involved in exercise, but that does not seem to be the case.”

Stager recognizes that these benefits are not affecting the majority of the population, which is growing more sedentary and obese. “What’s happening is that in term of fitness is that the haves have more, the have-nots have less.”

And while these benefits are not exclusive to ultra-endurance athletes, the rise of these long-distance events does seem to represent the extreme of a significant shift toward higher intensity. Marathon runs, to take one gauge of popularity, are surging: In 2011, more than 100,000 people applied for the New York marathon, and almost 27,000 ran the Boston marathon. And the 160-mile Race Across Indiana had about a dozen participants when it started 25 years ago; 1,250 finished the 2011.

Is it about togetherness?

Another factor that explains the explosion of ultra-endurance sports is marketing, Carda says. Ultras, Carda adds, are “just the next phase. In the ’60s, people started running, there was a fitness craze. There were marathons — not everybody got involved – but suddenly every city had a marathon.” In a beneficial spiral, cities have realized that ultra events – from the marathon up, can attract dollars. “There have always been bikers and runners, and the triathlon has been around for a long time, but the marketing end of things has caught up. “The Ironman is one of those events that has cachet, it’s the in thing to do.”

One more thought. Most people cannot relate to the idea of completing a marathon, let alone an ultra event, but the utterly ridiculous nature of these challenges brings the participants closer. “There is an ultra family, it doesn’t seem to matter what sport,” says Tanner. “There is competition between individuals, but the real competition is you against the distance, against the course. If you finish, then you win, in your own mind. You enjoy the people you are with, make a lot of friends, and when you go back to work on Monday, you have the satisfaction that you were able to push your limit, do something you thought maybe you could not do.”

That’s pretty much what we heard from Olson, who’s heading back to the Furnace Creek this fall. “Anybody who is going an ultra distance, even the real racers, will look to help you along in your journey. They will offer advice because they want you to finish.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

It’s an old, grim axiom of neuroscience: After an injury, the nerves in your hand, arm or leg may grow back, but neurons in the brain and the spinal cord will not.

Part of the reason is a molecule called proteoglycan — a biological insulation that separates tissues. During gestation, for example, proteoglycans prevent the placenta from growing too deeply into the uterus. “The proteoglycan molecule has been known as nature’s own barrier molecule,” says Jerry Silver, a professor of neuroscience at Case Western Reserve University.

Proteoglycan strongly inhibits the growth and movement of cells, and explains why cartilage has neither nerves nor a blood supply.

In the spinal cord, proteoglycan serves to lock the nerves into position, preventing unwanted growth. Unfortunately, when the spinal cord is injured, a new burst of proteoglycan “walls off the injury site, but also blocks nerve regeneration,” says Silver.

A bacterial balm?

Now, using an enzyme made by a deadly bacterium, Silver and his colleagues have learned to restore normal breathing in rats with a damaged spinal cord. The study, published in Nature yesterday, shows that a combination of grafting and a proteoglycan-eating enzyme called chondroitinase may sidestep the proteoglycan’s growth-deadening effect – and open a path to the holy Grail of partial repair to the spinal cord.

As scientists continue trying to rebuild the spinal cord with stem cells, the new study shows an alternative route to healing.

The technique is rooted in evolution, Silver says. “Proteoglycans are boundary molecules that have evolved over millennia. One bacterium, proteus vulgaris knows that, and has figured out how to release this enzyme to eat through our defenses.”

That ability allows the bacterium to cause deadly septic shock.

What they did

To demonstrate that grafts plus chondroitinase enzyme could restore function, Warren Alilain, the paper’s first author:

It’s important to realize that when the graft was first connected to the spinal cord, it no longer contained neurons. The graft serves as a tunnel lined with cells that supply growth factors and nutrients to nerves that are growing from the upper part of the spinal cord.

The wait for recovery seemed interminable, Silver admits. “Warren Alilain, my genius post-doc, had given up, he saw no substantial return of function at two months … but at 10 weeks, he ran into my office, he saw some activity coming back.”

After another two weeks, the disconnected nerves had regained at least 80 percent of their normal electrical output in 9 of the 11 animals that got grafts and enzyme.

Spinal cord: A brainy organ?

Just getting neurons to grow in the central nervous system is not enough: the nerves must connect to the motor nerves that activate the diaphragm. After all, the spinal cord contains more than ten thousand nerve cells, and neurosurgeons cannot hope to connect them individually; and instead want to coax a process of self-connection.

The coaxing worked: among about 3,000 spinal-cord neurons that grew through the graft tube, 400 to 500 linked to the neurons that used to control the diaphragm. In other words, the growing neurons seem to be “looking” for precisely those nerve cells that must be reconnected so the diaphragm can return to work. The spinal cord, Silver says, is “smart, and that’s encouraging news. I am more optimistic than I have ever been: The gain in function is really high.”

Yet despite the crying need for better treatments for spinal cord injury, at best this technique will not be available for some years.

The technique seems unlikely to restore the complicated connections needed for walking or typing, but severe paralysis would be eased just by activating a single muscle, Silver says. Bladder control is a major issue after a lower spinal injury, and many quadriplegics require a ventilator, which can fail or cause deadly infection. Learning to reactivate the diaphragm – and to breathe — could produce huge gains in quality of life.

Courtesy Jerry Silver, Case Western Reserve University

Enzyme and graft treatment each restored nerve function in most of the rats, but the best response came from a combined treatment.

“This is an interesting study,” says Daniel Resnick, associate professor of neurosurgery at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s a fairly vigorous model, measuring the diaphragm motion is a fairly clean measure.” Not only did the grafting process restore fairly normal breathing, but when the researchers cut the nerve graft at the end of the experiment, that removed the improvement in breathing. “That’s pretty convincing evidence that you have got neurons growing through the graft.”

The repair was not a true replacement for the spinal cord, Resnick adds. “They are not regenerating across the injury itself, but are by-passing it, going directly to the muscle. It’s not a cure for a spinal cord injury, but is a means to promote focal re-enervation, but for a high spinal cord injury, if you could get them off a ventilator, that is a big deal.”

Silver says the data also suggest that the bacterial enzyme may in some cases be effective enough to avoid grafting. “I am enthusiastic about using just the enzyme, in spinal cord injury and stroke rehabilitation,” Silver says. “Given the success to date – in our lab and others — it’s simple to do and seems to carry almost no risk — it’s just putting in a shot of enzyme as a way of stimulating neural plasticity.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Hunger season approaching?

In some places, the harvest is preceded by “hunger season,” when stored crops are exhausted but the new crop is not ready. For many reasons, we’re wondering if the Earth is entering a long hunger season:

Food prices reached records in February, which may even have helped spark the political unrest that swept the Middle East. As Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute notes, a 10 percent rise in the price of wheat barely budges the price of bread in developed countries, but directly boosts the price of chapattis in India.

The population is expected to reach about 9 billion by 2050, and 3 billion people with rising incomes have a growing appetite for grain-intensive animal protein.

The World Food Program estimates that one person in seven goes to bed hungry. One reason is poverty: In this world, only the poor are hungry. But other reasons are related to supply and demand:

The end of civilization?

Depleted soil is a legacy of many failed civilizations, wrote soil scientist David Montgomery1 of the University of Washington. “In recent decades, archaeological studies confirmed pronounced episodes of soil erosion associated with the rise and subsequent decline of civilizations in the Middle East, Greece, Rome, and Mesoamerica, as well as other regions around the globe.”

Indeed, Montgomery writes, “a limiting lifespan of an agricultural civilization can be estimated by the time needed for conventional agriculture to erode through the native stock of topsoil,” which “predicts reasonably well the historical pattern of a 500- to several-thousand-year lifespan for major civilizations around the world.” These calculations, he says, support the argument “that it was not the axe that cleared forests but the plow that followed that undermined many ancient societies.”

Soil health is often gauged by the percentage of organic matter — the decomposing plant material that feeds microbes and soil animals, and enables soil to hold water and nutrients, says Jane Johnson, a soil scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Minnesota. “Most of the characteristics that we associate with high quality soil are directly or indirectly linked to soil organic matter.”

Therefore, the emphasis on protecting and improving soil so it can feed an ever-growing population often comes down to the level of organic matter. In the United States, much of the cropland has already lost 30 to 50 percent of its organic matter since Europeans started farming a couple of centuries ago, says Rattan Lal, a professor of environment and natural resources at Ohio State University.

Most productive soil in Africa and Asia has lost 70 percent to 80 percent of its organic matter, says Lal, an outspoken defender of the soil, and long ago crossed the line toward ruination. “There is a threshold — about 1.2 percent to 2 percent of carbon [the usual measure of organic matter] — to maintain soil health, water retention and other soil services.”

Many soils in Africa, India and China have only one-tenth that much carbon, Lal says, and that leads to a truckload of trouble. “When you add fertilizer, it washes into the groundwater because the organic matter is not there, and the same goes for pesticides and herbicides. These chemicals wash into rivers or the groundwater, or enter the atmosphere, where they cause human health and environmental problems,” without conferring much benefit to the crop.

Lal says a train in his native Punjab, India is dubbed the “Cancer Express” because it travels through a region where “many people are prone to cancer because of pollution of the drinking water. The soil does not have the capacity to hold water and pollutants. That is what the biological health of soil does; you get microbial decomposition, absorption of organic matter and retention of water. If crop residues are taken away, if dung is taken away for cooking, the soil has nothing left to provide the services. It essentially becomes a sand culture.”

Good soil, great benefits…

About the only bright spot in the grim picture of soil destruction is this: many solutions offer synergistic benefits. Leaving a crop residue on the surface cuts wind and water erosion, and raises the level of organic matter. Conservation tillage cuts erosion, reduces the need for irrigation, and stores carbon in the soil. Smart irrigation reduces water use, and the need to plant on steep, erodible slopes.

Soil – some still call it dirt – is not as popular as Facebook or Dancing with the Stars. But it’s a whole lot more important. “Our ability to feed humankind in the future depends on a stable, improved soil resource,” says Jerry Hatfield, director of the Agricultural Research Service lab in Ames, Iowa.

Or, as University of Minnesota soil scientist William Larson once said, “Soil is that thin layer on the planet that stands between us and starvation.”

Enough with the problems. Let’s look at some serious soil solutions.

Washing away

Because water erosion can rapidly flush nutrients, mineral soil and organic matter from hilly land, the battle against water erosion has been a focus of American farmland conservation since the 1930s. One common prescription is contour planting; rows planted across the slope are more resistant to erosion than those running up the slope.

A standard way to protect soil is to leave crop residues in place after harvest, but bioenergy proposals often suggest that these wastes be fermented into cellulosic ethanol. The best solution depends on the situation, Johnson says. “If the land is highly erodible, we should not take residue. But if the landscape has a low erosion risk, then if we can manage it to protect organic matter by leaving enough residue in place, chances are we will have more than enough cover for erosion control. I believe it is possible to take some residue off, but not everywhere.”

The focus in protecting soil has shifted from the mineral component of soil to its organic matter, which is more sensitive, says Johnson. “In most cases, protecting the organic matter will protect against erosion, but if you only manage for erosion control, that may be not enough to retain the organic matter.”

Gone with the wind

The “Black Blizzards” of the 1930s Dust Bowl proved beyond question that wind can transport large amounts of soil to the wrong place. Could we see a rerun of the Dust Bowl? “People say we will never have a Dust Bowl again, because of the conservation practices that we put in,” says Hatfield, but the Dust Bowl also followed years of severe drought, which further stripped farm fields of cover.

Furthermore, says Hatfield, co-editor of a new book on soil management,2 many of the windbreaks planted to slow wind erosion have been removed to allow the use of large farm machinery. “What would happen if, across the Great Plains, we had three or four years with hardly any rainfall? I dare say we would not see the extent of the Dust Bowl, but would our current conservation practices be sufficient? … How much can you expect when the land is naked?”

Confronting drought

The Dust Bowl shocked Americans, but drought is a common problem that has differing consequences. Recent reports show that California’s farm industry did well during the 2007-2009 drought, mainly because large farmers had access to irrigation water. But wheat production in Southwest Kansas is now expected to fall at least 25 percent due to drought. According to Bloomberg News, the state’s wheat crop “has suffered irreversible damage from the country’s driest spring in half a century…”

In places where irrigation is impossible or inadequate, standard soil-conservation techniques, including retaining organic matter in and on the soil, can improve water retention.

ENLARGE

Cities devour farmland

The 80 million people joining the population every year require 3200 square kilometers land for shopping malls, roads, airports and housing. Cruelly, much of that growth occurs in places with productive soil, says Charles Rice, a professor of agronomy at Kansas State University, because big cities typically start out in a region with productive farms. “Chicago is a prime example; the soils in northern Illinois are some of the best in the world, but unfortunately Chicago is growing. I hate to see that valuable productive land paved, built upon. In Asia and Europe, around the world, megacities are consuming land. We need to figure this out, but nobody has.”

Salty soil is worthless soil

A bright idea: reduce tillage, save topsoil

Perhaps the largest success story in protecting soil is the no-till revolution in agriculture. Rather than turning over soil to bury weeds and crop residues, a no-till machine plants directly in the stubble, then controls weeds with herbicide. The process saves diesel fuel and also retains organic matter, says Hatfield, who observes that carbon compounds oxidize rapidly when the soil is disturbed. “We need to protect the soil from within, with more organic matter, and from the external forces, like wind and water.” Sustaining the soil, he says, “Is really about building that organic matter reservoir.”

In 2010, no- or low-till farming occupied at least 20 million hectares each in the United States, Brazil and Argentina, with significant areas in Canada and Australia.

“If you go to South America and talk to producers,” says Hatfield, “they look at conservation practices as the normal accepted practice — if you used a moldboard plow [which turns over the soil and exposes it to erosion] they would probably shoot you! In the last 20 years, they have realized what a precious resources soil is, and to maintain its viability, they have preserved the organic matter.”

But worldwide, no-till occupies only 6 or 7 percent of the 1,500 million hectares under cultivation. “You could call that a success,” says Lal. “But in the places where it is needed most desperately, Africa, Asia, those desperate farmers cannot implement no-till.”

Summing up

Optimism is not a common response to discussions of the world’s degrading soils. Lal says two to three billion hectares already are degraded, but contends that problems related to energy use, global warming and clean water also have strong ties to land degradation.

To take two examples, surface water is easily polluted when it washes off eroded land, and healthy soil stores vast amounts of carbon, slowing global warming. “All these issues are linked with one another, and soil is the common link,” says Lal. “We have the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] to address climate change … but soil is addressed by nobody, even though … we cannot address water security, energy, biofuels, global warming, without soil.”

Not to mention the daily problem of putting bread on the table…

But here’s a reason for optimism: The measures that can solve individual problems often can solve multiple problems. Conservation tillage saves water, organic matter, topsoil, even energy. Drip irrigation reduces salinity and saves water and energy. Cover crops raise fertility and reduce erosion.

And, no coincidence, all of these soil-friendly practices also increase yields.

So if you like to eat, the time to think about soil is … now.

Fish in the Gulf of Mexico: How safe?

The fire and deadly explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20, 2010 spewed a gusher of crude oil — about 4.4 million barrels — into the Gulf of Mexico.

The blowout flooded all levels of the Gulf with oil. And that oil, combined with millions of gallons of an oil-degrading chemical, raised questions about the health of Gulf seafood, both shellfish and finfish.

Fishing is major in the Gulf of Mexico, which in 2008 produced 15 percent of total weight of U.S. commercial fishing, and which has more sport fishers than any other American region.

Within two weeks, as a precaution to prevent the sale of contaminated fish, the government began closing parts of the Gulf to commercial fishing.

A report published today in Environmental Health Perspectives reviews the aftermath: How big was the threat? Did the closures harm the fishing industry by giving, in effect, official endorsement to the idea that the fish were contaminated? Were there any gaps in protection?

Not very filthy

The report came to an optimistic conclusion: government-sponsored studies of Gulf fish since the blowout found no significant contamination with heavy, persistent compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. “I don’t know that we have any evidence that the fish were contaminated, ever,” says study first author Julia Gohlke, an assistant professor of environmental health science at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

PAHs can cause cancer and are often used as a measure of hydrocarbon contamination. According to the new study, “Federal seafood testing results released to date” show PAH levels at roughly 1 percent of the “level of concern” that the Food and Drug Administration established for assessing food safety after the Deepwater blowout.

Other results, she says, have focused on total hydrocarbons derived from oil, rather than PAHs. “My analysis looked at what the government has done,” she says. “There are independent reports of contamination that I tried to include, but they did not measure PAHs, only total petroleum hydrocarbons.”

Large oil spills are so ominous that people can overreact, says Gohlke. “People see an oil spill and fisheries closures and assume everything must be contaminated, and nobody wants to eat anything. There is a misunderstanding of what is considered contamination. There is now a large dataset, at this point, to show there hasn’t been significant hydrocarbon contamination to date.”

Gohlke and colleagues looked at data on the BP blowout, and previous oil spills from around the world, to compare toxicity levels and evaluate the procedures used to close and open fisheries. The project was funded by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation to the Environmental Defense Fund.

Looking at samples taken during and after the blowout, no results suggested that eating fish – whether with shells or fins – would contain elevated levels of PAHs, says Gohlke, who cautions that monitoring should continue for years because buried oil may re-enter the water and contaminate fish.

After the BP spill, fishing was banned in as much as 37 percent of the Exclusive Economic Zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which extends 200 nautical miles from the coast. These bans were precautionary, since they were made in advance of contamination tests, says Gohlke.

Although “safe, not sorry” can be justified, closures can also have unintended consequences, or even backfire, she says. “Part of me thinks the precautionary approach is appropriate, but I don’t know how it has contributed to consumer confidence. Without sufficient risk communication, precautionary closures may create an expectation that the fish is contaminated. The last survey I saw, from February, suggested people were still considering Gulf seafood to be contaminated.”

“I think they make some pretty good recommendations to continue monitoring for PAHs,” says Ron Kendall, director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University. “There is a lot of debate about underwater oil mats that are still floating, and how much oil may still be on the seafloor or in coastal marshes. With hurricane season approaching, we don’t know what kind of remobilizing of suspended oil and the mats will take place.”

To date, Kendall says, the data show that seafood has safe levels of PAHs, but “You’ve got to understand that all this oil is not gone. This story is still unfolding.”

No duh.

Year after year, the greeting card and flower industries goad us to honor our mothers, and we Whyfilers are glad to comply. This year, we celebrate by exploring what we learned about mothers at the February, 2011, meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science — the AAAS.

It may sound obvious, but understanding mothering helps us understand our world!

In early life, your mother is likely to be your most important person, emotionally, cognitively and behaviorally.
Photo: Din Jimenez

Mothers make us better people (Duh?)

More than 50 years ago, when University of Wisconsin psychologist Harry Harlow separated infant monkeys from their mothers, they grew up anxious, jittery, emotional wrecks. It’s amazing to think somebody needed to prove the value of mother’s love, but during Harlow’s time, behaviorism — a psychology rooted in the study of rats — was ascendant.

Academic psychologists focused on stimulus and response, not on the intricacies of the heart.

Today, Harlow’s findings seem like simple common sense, but they made him a rock star to the public — and eventually to his academic colleagues.

Stephen Suomi, one of Harlow’s last graduate students, has continued this line of research at the National Institute of Child Health and Development, again using rhesus macaque monkeys to model human behavior.

Genes don’t equate with destiny.

Back in Harlow’s day, genes were seen as destiny. Now, scientists like Suomi are finding a more interesting and flexible interaction among genes, environment, behavior, hormones and brain structure.

Suomi says that like people, “Between 5 and 10 percent of macaques are unusually impulsive; they do stupid things that most monkeys would not try. They will confront a dominant monkey. Most monkeys know how to back off, but when these monkeys are in an aggressive encounter, somebody can get hurt.”

Similarly, by age 2, some children “are identified as highly aggressive and likely to stay highly aggressive as they grow up,” Suomi says. “At school, they cause classroom disruptions. By their teens, many can be found in prison or the morgue.” In both monkeys and people, “these features show up very early and are remarkably stable.”

Aggression shows up early in some people, often leading to time behind bars.
Photo: Washington State Legislature

Stay close, my baby

Psychologically and physically, the infant monkey is reliant on its mother. Infant macaques “are almost always in physical contact or within arm’s length of their mother,” says Suomi, “which forms a strong, enduring attachment bond that is the functional equivalent of the one that human infants form with a caregiver.”

After a couple of months, that bond is established and the infant starts to explore, using mother as a “secure base,” Suomi says. “If they lose access to her, any motivation to explore will disappear; they get unhappy.” As these developing monkeys spend hours playing with peers, “every behavior pattern for normal functioning is established.”

Harlow raised infant monkeys with inanimate replacements for the mother and saw a range of deranged behavior. These days, Suomi removes young monkeys from mother and raises them with other youngsters. These “peer-reared” monkeys (are you thinking Lord of the Flies?) — develop what Suomi calls “hyper attachments. They spend excessive amounts of time clinging to each other when they should be exploring their world.”

Under these circumstances, play never reaches the normal “intensity and complexity,” Suomi adds.

Peer-reared monkeys spend more time clinging to one another than being Curious Georges.
Photo: Noneotuho

I’m afraid. Why aren’t you?

To understand why this is of more than theoretical interest, we need to meet serotonin, a key chemical for communication among neurons. Some variants of the serotonin genes are linked to high rates of suicide, depression and incarceration, and serotonin metabolism is affected by Prozac and other drugs.

In behavior, Suomi says, the peer-reared monkeys resemble the 5 to 10 percent of normal monkeys that are naturally fearful, anxious and aggressive. Both groups have a defective use of serotonin, but in the peer-reared monkeys, “this is not a product of genetics, it’s a product of social experience.”

Certain variants of the serotonin gene — and also certain experiences — are associated with increased desire for alcohol, Suomi says. When adolescent monkeys attend “the monkey version of a happy hour, some consume more than others, and the peer-reared ones consume considerably more.”

Early experience, in fact, affects the activity of one-fifth of monkey’s entire genome, Suomi says.

Suomi’s studies also show that drinking behavior is crucially dependent on upbringing: a good “childhood” can cancel out the effects of “negative” genes. “If the monkey has a good mother, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. It does not matter which alleles [variants] are present; you have normal serotonin metabolism. A good mother protects those who carry this allele, and it’s the same story in aggression, the same story with alcohol. With a good mother, you drink less.”¹

Why does momma matter?

The role of genetics has been a highly controversial area in development. A century ago, genes were destiny: people were essentially robots acting out immutable genetic instructions.

Then the focus shifted to external factors, and autism, for example, was blamed on a “cold” mother. Within a few decades, the advances in analyzing the structure of genes returned genetic determinism to vogue, and researchers began to search, for example, for an autism gene.

That approach quickly faded, W. Thomas Boyce of the University of British Columbia told the AAAS, in favor of a more sophisticated “behavioral genetics” focused on gene-environment interactions.

Genetics is getting more complicated, less deterministic, and more interesting. In the new genetics, mommas matter, even after birth!
Photo: Jen Watson

Now, in recognition that chemicals that are modified by experience affect the activity of genes, that picture is being enlarged in a discipline called epigenetics. In this new view, genes affect our environment, and environment affects whether and how genes act.

“The old metaphor of the genome being a blueprint for constructing the developing brain is faulty in certain ways,” says Boyce. “It may be more accurate to say that we begin with a blueprint, and partly build the house, then the family moves in and the blueprint gets modified. There is a feedback that alters the expression of the blueprint, based on the experience of the individual living in the house.”

The long shadow of poverty

How does this play out in the real world? Unstable and unmarried families tend to be poor, and social class correlates with higher rates of asthma, disease and injuries, says Boyce. At birth, physicians routinely record measures like weight and gestational age as a rough gauge of health, but Boyce thinks they ought to add social factors to the mix.

In fact, a study² that tracked health and education in 4,667 infants born in Winnipeg, Canada, for 19 years showed that the traditional biological measurements were less predictive than social factors related to health and education.

Growing up economically poor could mean growing up with poorer health, too.
Photo: Bread for the World

Since “half the world’s children grow up in poverty,” Boyce says it would make sense to look more closely at social risk factors, rather than focus on physical measures. Given that “15 to 20 percent of the overall population is responsible for over half of medical, psychiatric morbidity, and physician and health care use,” understanding social risk factors could be a key step to ameliorating poor health, he says.

The fragile family

As the American family has changed — some would say disintegrated — social scientists have shifted their focus from divorce, to the “fragile families” formed by unmarried couples. In some fragile families, the mother is single; in others she and the father are cohabiting.

“About 40 percent of American children are born into an unmarried family now,” says Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Columbia University, a principal investigator on the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study.

The study is looking at the environments in which children are being raised, and which factors are most harmful to their health, welfare and education. “Some situations are stable, while others are not,” says Brooks-Gunn.

The Fragile Families study has followed about 5,000 children for nine years, with a focus on “stability and chaos, how they affect resources and investments in child well-being” Brooks-Gunn says. “Nobody will ever do this again; getting approval at 75 hospitals was a nightmare.”

Study personnel interviewed the mother within 24 hours of birth, and also a rather surprising 75 percent of the unwed fathers, Brooks-Gunn said. “Babies are darling, and everybody comes to the hospital to see them.”

The researchers then observed the children at home at ages 3, 5 and 9, to gather data on physical, social and psychological development, and they found the original optimism fading.

While rates have declined a bit, one quarter of all children, and half of black children, live with a single parent. Researchers continue to find high rates of physical, social and economic difficulties in non-married families.
Graph: The State of our Unions 2010, The National Marriage Project

“At birth, everybody expects things will go well; 75 percent of the [unwed] mothers believe they will marry the father,” Brooks-Gunn says, “but by year five, the relationship with the biological dad has ended for two thirds of these mothers. There is a huge increase in new partners, and in having children with a new partner.”

As a rule, the fathers who spent time with their children were those who had not had a child with another woman, says Brooks-Gunn. “And when the mother has a new partner, the father is out of the picture.”

The Fragile Family study³ found that:

• At age 3, children in stable families (whether married, co-habiting or a single mother), had better vocabulary than children of married or cohabiting parents in an unstable relationship.
• Children’s cognitive scores improved when their unwed parents marry.
• Each additional change in family structure increases the odds of behavioral problems. With more family and residential transitions, the mother becomes more likely to report stress and hitting her children.
• Conflicts in the parental relationship intensify behavior problems in children, regardless of the stability of the family structure.
• Having a single mother raises the odds of obesity, asthma, hospitalization and accidents.

Children of stable married couples scored best on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised, a standard intelligence test, implying better cognitive development. Beware: This does not prove that a stable marriage makes kids smarter; socioeconomic status and other factors still matter.
Data: FFCWS. Graph: J. Waldfogel et al, (2010). Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing. Future of Children, 20(2): 87-112.

This is not to say that simply being unmarried is the direct cause of all problems, given the many other factors in play, as Brooks-Gunn and colleagues noted. “While children born to unwed parents are at higher risk of low birth weight … women who are not married at the time of the birth are also more likely to smoke cigarettes and use illicit drugs during pregnancy, and less likely to receive prenatal care in the first trimester of their pregnancy, all of which are associated with low birth weight.”

Many factors may explain how a parental relationship affects children, Brooks-Gunn indicated:

• Parental resources: How much time, money and education?
• Parenting quality: How do the parents interact with the child?
• Father involvement: How present is he?
• Parental relationship: Are the parents stable and loving? Do they interact well with the child?
• Parental mental health: How well are the parents, psychologically?

Child-rearing outside of marriage is increasing among all women, especially among those with the least education.
Graph: The State of our Unions 2010, The National Marriage Project

The Fragile Family studies “add to a large body of earlier work that suggested that children who live with single or cohabiting parents fare worse as adolescents and young adults in terms of their educational outcomes, risk of teen birth, and attachment to school and the labor market than do children who grow up in married-couple families,” Brooks-Gunn and colleagues concluded.

Overall, the findings are distressing, Brooks-Gunn told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February. “Our findings are more negative than I would expect. There is a lot of instability, and that affects this incredible disparity in how children are doing. This has incredible consequences for society. Forty percent of all kids are born into a non-married household. We are talking about diverging destinies.”

Ecuadorian mother and child
Photo: paggre

– David J. Tenenbaum

The prospect of peak coffee raises the menace of massive caffeine withdrawal, with hordes of headachy addicts rendered into grouchy slackers. Could a cut in coffee production also cost us the many health benefits that coffee seems to provide?

For ages, the bitter black brew has been scorned as jet fuel for jittery insomniacs, providing nothing more than a momentary surge of focus and energy.

But recently, some researchers are starting to see java as the juice of the gods: In some studies, coffee appears to be protective against dementia, type 2 diabetes and even several types of cancer.

Coffee, it turns out, is loaded with polyphenols, anti-oxidant chemicals that fight damaging free radicals, which are implicated in many of the diseases of aging.

Caveat quaffer

Before we fill our cup with a discussion of the health benefits of coffee, remember these cautions:

For all these reasons, we are not prescribing coffee as medicine. But then, do we drink coffee for medicine, or for the taste, the excuse to talk things over with a friend, the acceleration physical and mental energy?

So bottoms up, and let’s check some recent studies showing how coffee affects dementia, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer

Coffee: Good for your brain?

Many studies over the past decade have suggested that coffee can partly block Parkinson’s disease, a movement disorder that afflicts millions of elders. In 2006, ² researchers reported on a 22-year study of Finns – who boast Earth’s highest average coffee consumption – and found that people who drank more than 10 cups a day had about one-quarter the risk of Parkinson’s as non-drinkers. (Do Finns ever finish guzzling? While only 5 percent of the sample abstained, about 10 percent drank at least 10 cups a day!)

The researchers suggested that since Parkinson’s may be caused by oxidative attack on neurons, coffee’s protection may arise from its anti-oxidants.

Several studies – the results are inconsistent but suggestive – have linked caffeine and coffee with a reduction in Alzheimer’s disease. In 2010, after a 21-year study, researchers from Finland and Sweden³ reported that “coffee drinking of three to five cups per day at midlife was associated with a decreased risk of dementia/Alzheimer’s disease by about 65 percent at late-life.”

Research using mice with a genetic tendency to Alzheimer’s shows that coffee and caffeine improve learning and memory while reducing the beta amyloid plaques that mark Alzheimer’s. In 2011, when Gary Arendash and Chuanhai Cao of the University of South Florida compared coffee, caffeine and decaf,⁴ coffee was most effective at stimulating chemicals that apparently defend against Alzheimer’s. The researchers wrote that “coffee may be the best source of caffeine to protect against [Alzheimer's disease]” because another coffee chemical acts with caffeine to enhance protection.

Arendash did not respond to our email but said in 2009 that he’s seen “evidence that caffeine could be a viable ‘treatment’ for established Alzheimer’s disease, and not simply a protective strategy. That’s important because caffeine is a safe drug for most people, it easily enters the brain, and it appears to directly affect the disease process.”

Coffee ‘n cancer

Can coffee help protect against cancer? Sometimes.

Photo Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center

Caffeine removed harmful beta amyloid plaques from the brains of mice that simulate Alzheimer’s disease.

A study of coffee and liver cancer followed 60,323 Finns for a median of 19.3 years. After adjusting for factors like age, alcohol and smoking, the hazard ratio of those who drank four to five cups was 0.44.

Hazard ratio means the probability of an outcome, compared to the reference group (non-drinkers, in this case). All other things being equal, abstainers were three times as likely to get liver cancer as those who swilled eight cups a day.⁵

To decipher conflicting or inconclusive studies, scientists can pool data using meta-analysis, a technique that sets standards for acceptable studies and then statistically groups the results.

In 2010, Mia Hashibe, in the department of family and preventive medicine at the University of Utah re-analyzed⁶ nine studies and found a 39 percent reduction in mouth and throat cancers among people who drank at least four cups. “Since coffee is so widely used and there is a relatively high incidence and low survival rate of these forms of cancers, our results have important public health implications that need to be further addressed,” said Hashibe. With such a large sample, “We had more statistical power to detect associations between cancer and coffee.”

If we shift the focus to all cancers, a new meta-analysis⁷ of 59 studies showed that each additional cup of coffee reduced the incidence of cancer by 3 percent.

The results concerning breast cancer are less encouraging. A 2008 report⁸, based on data from 85,987 women, found no significant link to coffee, decaf or tea, except for a slight reduction in breast cancer among post-menopausal women who ingested a significant amount of caffeine.

Similarly, a 2009 study in the Netherlands ⁹ found no association between coffee and breast cancer.

Ironically, coffee contains a chemical that could stimulate the many breast cancers that respond to estrogen by growing, according to Clinton Allred, an assistant professor of nutrition at Texas A&M University. Allred, who has found large amounts of a plant estrogen called trigonelline in coffee, says, “This is one of the least studied compounds I have ever been around.”

In the lab, Allred showed that trigonelline can affect cells even when it is thousands of times more dilute than the effective concentration of isoflavone, a common plant estrogen found in soy.

Allred is not worried about trigonelline, since people have been guzzling coffee for a long time, and plant chemicals consumed in a whole food or beverage act differently than they do in isolation in the lab. “People with a healthy diet that is high in plant products are exposed to these kinds of compounds all the time.”

A diabetes connection?

Could coffee slow the epidemic of type 2 diabetes, which disrupts sugar metabolism, which raises blood sugar that harms small blood vessels in the kidney, eye and heart? A 2006 study¹⁰ of 88,259 American women showed that drinking at least four cups of coffee reduced the diabetes rate to 53 percent of the rate among non-drinkers. Although both coffee and decaf (but not tea), were beneficial, diabetes prevention was most closely linked to coffee intake rather than caffeine intake.

According to a meta-analysis¹¹ based on more than 450,000 people from Asia, North American and Europe, “Every additional cup of coffee consumed in a day was associated with a 7 percent reduction in the excess risk of diabetes type 2. … Drinking three to four cups of coffee per day was associated with an approximate 25 percent lower risk of diabetes… .”

If coffee reduces diabetes, could it deter cancers associated with diabetes? A 2007 exploration¹² of the soaring rate of cancer after World War II in Japan linked coffee to reductions in liver and pancreatic cancer in men, and liver, colon and endometrial cancer in women. The authors speculated that coffee could reduce resistance to insulin, “and may thereby reduce the risk of diabetes-related cancers such as colon, liver, pancreas and endometrium.”

A matter of the heart

A 2010 study¹³ of 37,514 Dutch people found a slight benefit for coffee in heart disease: People who drank two to three cups a day had only 79 percent the rate of heart disease as abstainers, but the reduction was not statistically significant. Above 4 cups per day, the rate returned close to the no-coffee rate. Coffee did not affect the rate of strokes.

However, Swedish researchers studied¹⁴ people after a heart attack, and found that drinking one to three cups of coffee reduced the odds of dying to 68 percent of the risk for abstainers.

We put down our coffee mug with a jittery hand, wondered whether swilling coffee could harm the heart, and phoned Richard Page, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Page, an expert in arrhythmias – the irregular heart rhythms that can cause deadly heart attacks – said, “It’s hard to demonstrate a relationship between caffeine consumption and arrhythmias, but there are case reports. I see a number of patients with arrhythmias, particularly atrial fibrillation, and occasionally we see some relationship with excessive consumption of caffeine.”

Although Page was not alarmed by coffee, he was not so sure about the mega-doses that were linked to health benefits in some studies. “I would be cautious; I have heard of a couple of adolescents developing atrial fibrillation (a hard-to-treat arrhythmia) after taking monster energy drinks; I don’t think such high doses of caffeine are good for people.”

The bottom line

If Captain C seems helpful against some cancers, dementia and diabetes, is it guaranteed to extend your life? No. A European study¹⁵, for example, found that “Neither coffee nor tea consumption was associated with stroke or all-cause mortality.”

A long American study, using data from 41,736 men (followed for 18 years), and 86, 214 women (24 years), found a slight, significant trend toward fewer deaths from all causes; those who drank at least six cups a day had a death rate just 80 percent (men) to 83 percent (women) of the non-drinkers. The main benefit was a reduction in cardiovascular disease.

However, coffee consumption did not affect cancer deaths, after adjusting for factors like obesity and smoking, and the authors concluded, ¹⁶ “The possibility of a modest benefit of coffee consumption on all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality needs to be further investigated.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but then, did we promise a simple answer?

Would you like your triple-espresso with soy milk?