The Soda File

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Roger Gosden

“Which boy can tell me about sodium?”

“Please, sir.” One of the little crawlers in the front row of the class shot his arm up, revealing a neatly-ironed white sleeve. “It’s salt, sir.”

“WRONG!” the teacher roared. He thumped his fist on the desk so hard that a pen jumped. Glaring at stupidity, he told us, “It’s a metal.”

‘Basher’ was the only teacher who terrified us in elementary chemistry classes. The hulk behind the desk was infinitely old with jowls like a Labrador retriever, a few wispy hairs greased back in a pretense of covering his bald pate, and a large fat nose squished like a slug to one side. He only smiled when our public exam results came through, and that gesture betrayed a row of crooked teeth like leaning gravestones.  Less courageous boys who avoided his class wondered how such a teacher could shepherd us to so many top grades. But it was no secret—it was FEAR.

We had nicknames for all our teachers, but ‘Basher’ was the most fitting. He had been a heavyweight boxer whom the headmaster hired out of retirement when there was a shortage of qualified chemistry teachers in our London Borough of Sidcup. Basher was a showman because he learned in ‘the ring.’

That day he used a pair of tongs to lift a silvery metal fragment out of a jar filled with oil. “What’s this Farrington?” The boy looked blank and scared.

“Is it sodium, sir?” That was the class smart alec. In those days, our teachers addressed us by our surnames, and they were always ‘Sir’ to us.

He held it in the flame of a Bunsen where it burned with a bright yellow flame. “That’s Na,” he informed us pointing a stubby finger at the large poster on the wall. Later, we heard it was called the Periodic Table. “Now boys, gather round in a circle.”

We trooped from our desks to watch him drop the flaming metal in a tank of water where it raced and fizzled on the surface until extinguished. Our curiosity grew in leaps and bounds when we learned the bubbles were explosive hydrogen gas.  Basher was playing magician and loved being on stage.

We were not the only schoolboys to enjoy this experiment. A generation earlier, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks described the same on a London pond in his book, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. He wrote: “It took fire instantly and sped around and around on the surface like a demented meteor, with a huge sheet of yellow flame above it.”

Sodium was not the only exciting ‘demonstration’ in chemistry that year. I look back in horror on the day he heated a beaker of benzene on an open bench; I can’t remember its purpose, but loved the sweet odor as it vaporized. Our teacher didn’t tolerate health and safety wimps getting in the way of life experience. The older staff in our boys’ school had grown up facing far greater dangers two decades earlier while serving in the War, and Basher was undoubtedly a commando.

The reason why gratitude to him conquered fear of him was his recipe for making NI3.NH3 from innocent-looking ingredients we could buy in a store. This contact explosive is completely safe while it stays moist, but when dried as a smear it goes off with a loud bang and puff of purple smoke at the slightest touch. It was the perfect revenge for the other class who sneered at us ‘Basherboys.’ Huddling outside all-ears, we waited for class break when they visited the school toilets…

Basher never gave us any practical demonstrations of salt because it was a boring substance. Sodium chloride is an extremely stable union of two highly-reactive ions. It did, however, interest the biology and geography teachers, and no doubt was an ingredient of cookery classes at the girls’ school in those days. Today, there is plenty of talk about common salt, but I hardly ever hear anything about sodium now.

As one of the commonest salts leaching out of the earth’s crust, it is carried down rivers to the oceans where it is concentrated over eons. If life originated in the oceans, seawater bathed the ‘bodies’ of the first creatures before body fluids, and later blood, provided a controlled internal environment. But as oceans became more briny, sea-life had to adapt: bodies become dehydrated when water is withdrawn osmotically from their less concentrated fluids. Our body is only a third as concentrated as seawater. Kidneys and gills in fish or salt glands in seabirds help to expel excess salt from drinking sea water, whereas shellfish and sharks solve the problem differently by conforming to the solute strength around them. Salmon and eels that migrate between the ocean and rivers have extraordinary ways of adapting to salt stress. Even marine fish cannot tolerate much higher concentrations of salt, which is a good preservative for ‘saltfish.’

How did mermaids manage to live in the sea if we can’t? Adrift in a raft, we can only survive for around 10-11 days without fresh water. The temptation for a thirsty survivor to drink seawater is huge, and watching albatrosses sipping it might drive him crazy, but it would hasten delirium and death. Our kidneys can’t produce urine concentrated enough to get rid of excess sodium, so our blood gets more and more briny. In the movie Unbroken, based on a book of the same name by Laura Hillenbrand, “Louie” Zamperini was afloat on a raft for 47 days in the Pacific Ocean. He drank rainwater.

Lot's wife in Book of Genesis

Lot of salt (200g)

A modest amount of sodium chloride in our diet, along with other minerals, is needed to replace natural losses because its ions are essential for cells to function.  We contain about 200g of sodium chloride, not exactly a “pillar of salt” which was what Lot’s wife was reduced to as punishment for turning to look back at Sodom.

Although we need perhaps as little as 0.5g of salt a day, or a quarter teaspoon, we almost always consume much more. The American Heart Association now advises a new lower limit of 2.3g or only 1.5g for people with hypertension, or who by reason of age or genetics are at risk of high blood pressure and stroke.

But how much salt do we eat and how can we control it? We can push the salt cellar away from our plate and buy unsalted peanuts from the grocery store, but how much are we consuming unwittingly in processed foods and restaurant meals? It is a problem like sugar – salt is tasty and hard to avoid. Basher told us that sodium chloride is unreactive, but as a biologist I take that with a grain of salt.

Next Post: Virginia Nature Journal for February

Posted in Biomedical | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Soda File

Virginia Nature Journal for January

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Roger Gosden

  • BurnsPoem

     After the merry Christmas holidays and the high spirits of Hogmanay and Ne’er Day in Scotland, January stretches out, dark, drab and driech. February too promises precious few fine days, although the longer daylight hours are cheering.

    It is time for those at work and home to hunker down, and for snowbirds to fly out of blizzard-blasted northern states and Canada, past chilly Virginia to the warm blanket of southern Florida.

    grosbeak

    Young Rose-breasted Grosbeak. Courtesy Geoff Giles

    Birds too are on the move. The neotropicals headed further south several months ago, although a few hardy individuals stayed on in our Williamsburg area through the light snows and recent ice-storm. How would they manage without the hospitality of feeder stations in gardens and yards? Every year, there are reports of a hummingbird and a tanager lingering here in mid-winter, and a Rose-breasted Grosbeak visited a friend’s garden this month. I wonder if these vagrants are seasonally disoriented or knowingly hanging around avian soup kitchens, but they are thrilling sights for being among our most colorful birds.

    A flock descending in the backyard like a sudden squall can lift a brow leaning at the computer for a welcome moment of respite from concentrated work. Mostly American Robins and occasionally Red-winged blackbirds or grackles, they are probably not the residents of other times of year for those birds have temporarily gone to more southerly neighborhoods. The winter relatives have come down from the north to feast on left-over berries of holly, wax myrtle, and red cedar. Why the locals moved away before emptying their larder puzzles me, but the policy helps the migrants who replace them. The wrens, nuthatches and chickadees seen at this time of year may also be newcomers, but I like to think my special friends, the cardinals and bluebirds, stay with us the year round. But how could I know unless I banded them?

    bird feeder

    Small bird feeder – fat, grain and seeds

    We only see White-throated Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos in the coastal plain in winter. They skulk around the shrubbery, ignoring the gardener at work nearby, and take turns to peck suet on the feeder. Juncos are nick-named ‘snowbirds’ because they are regarded as harbingers of hard weather. In the mountains above 3,000 feet, they are the only birds you can count on seeing throughout January. The deer have no choice but to stay the year round, and many animals perished of starvation in the very hard winter five years ago. Bears are safe from the elements while torpid in their dens. Most other birds and critters move down the valleys to better pickings around creeks or to even further afield. But you can tempt some of them to stay.

    big feeder

    The Big Feeder

    Last fall, I hauled 200 pounds of whole corn and chicken scratch in a barrel 20 feet up in the low canopy between two trees. The job needed a hand winch and a block and tackle. Under a hole in the base of the barrel, a small propeller spins automatically every 12 hours, scattering grain in a 50 foot radius for six seconds. A gamecam monitors the area and a motion detector rings in the house 100 feet away to tell me when to grab binoculars. But the hefty feeder was not installed for the benefit of viewers; it feeds the hungry while I am away, and only needs replenishing every two months.

    Winter trees are wisely bare and silent, but this helps me to see further into the woods. The season is not dead; wildlife are coming to their Time Square.

    In the past few hours, several deer came to nibble grain. Four ruffed grouse in cuddly feather balls strutted around, and two fox squirrels, so much larger and more handsome than gray relatives, darted back and forth with grain to a hiding place. And there was rarely a moment when small birds were absent. There was no fighting over food and, despite the bitter cold, most visitors were in mated pairs. A pineal gland tells them the time of year. I recorded a mother bear grubbing under the feeder with two adorable cubs, but now she may be dreaming of spring with a tiny newborn pup or two attached to her teats. January is hard, but has its compensations, and is full of distant anticipation.

    Next Post: The Soda File

     

Posted in Seasons in Virginia | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Who knows about Fructose?

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Roger Gosden
Lucas Cranach Adam & Eve

Lucas Cranach (1526). The Courtauld Gallery (extract)

Was it a sweet or sexy temptation?

The apple that Eve pluckedSweeter than honey from the tree was sweeter than honey, or to be perfectly accurate it had relatively more of the sweeter stuff than in honey. Apples contain more fructose than glucose, and fructose is much sweeter than either glucose or sucrose (the sugar in our pantry).

Aside from the creation story, the other theory predicts that some plants acquired an advantage by evolving biochemical pathways that generated more flavorsome sugar, like fructose, in their ripening fruit. Being more attractive to eaters, helped to disperse seeds to places where they could thrive. Eve is in the apple, as fructose.

‘Fructose’ has a healthy ring, from its Latin root for ‘fruit.’ We were advised to eat an apple a day to keep the doctor away, and fructose was recommended for people with diabetes because it has a low glycemic index. But it may not be such a good prescription, and has been losing its salubrious cachet ever since high fructose corn syrup was introduced forty years ago. Glucose still glitters, which is a differentiation that seems odd at first sight because the two molecules have the same number of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

sugar

Glucose + Fructose = Sucrose

Having identical chemical formulas does not make them the same. They are no more the same substance than genetically identical twins are the same person. Glucose and fructose are monosaccharide sugars forming in equal amounts when their parent molecule, sucrose, is digested by enzymes breaking its oxygen bridge apart. The two ‘baby’ sugars have different shapes, but when it is their turn to be digested they generate the same number of calories. But not all calories are equal.

Shape matters. Consider another sugar-lover. When yeast cells feed on the sugary mixture in unfermented grape ‘must’ they mostly prefer glucose, and as alcohol increases in the liquor more undigested fructose is left behind. That can make a wine too sweet for taste. Vintners are therefore choosy because some strains of yeast have a greater affinity for fructose which makes a drier product. Not all yeasts are equal.

Of these twins, only glucose is essential for life, although we don’t need to eat it raw because it is created by digestion of more complex carbohydrates and fats. We manage perfectly well without fructose in our diet too. Even sperm, which are nourished in fructose-rich semen, are equally satisfied when provided with only glucose.

More interestingly, our body handles the two sugars very differently. Glucose is rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream from the small intestine via a special transporter (GLUT4). It then races through the liver for delivery to every corner of the body. Under strict control by the hormone, insulin, glucose provides fuel for metabolism and growth in cells, and any surplus is converted to fat and stored in adipose tissue.

On the other hand, fructose is absorbed slowly from the gut and by a different transporter (GLUT5), and even more poorly in infants where it can cause diarrhea. Once it reaches the hepatic portal vein it stops at the liver where it is taken up into cells by a process that doesn’t involve insulin. Once inside, it is handled differently to glucose, forming glycerol as a backbone for making triglycerides.  Several studies have shown that fructose-rich diets raise both triglyceride levels and LDL small particles while lowering HDL-cholesterol, which are thought to be unhealthy signs. Since fructose is lipidinous, it potentially contributes to metabolic syndrome, including diabetes and obesity, and there is additional evidence of a role in fatty liver, gout, and inflammatory conditions. Eve was wise to offer Adam only one apple.

Until a little over a century ago, dietary sugar could only be afforded by the wealthy and powerful. No longer. Growing up with cheap and omnipresent sugar, it is easy to equate abundance with beneficence. The longest aisles in supermarkets are stacked with sodas and sports drinks full of sugars, and rows of ‘healthy’ apple juice contain a whopping 100 grams of fructose per liter. Those are the most visited aisles in stores, and conveniently located near cash registers.

sweet drinks aisle

Longest aisle in the supermarket

At home, grocery products lining pantry and fridge shelves are also saturated with sugars. But it’s hard to know how much sugar we consume by reading labels. How can we accurately compare it in different foods or brands when labels describe amounts as ‘serving sizes’ instead of ounces or grams? How much sugar is added versus natural? How much is glucose versus fructose versus sucrose? As consumers buy more processed foods instead of using raw ingredients for home cooking we are locked into choices made by manufacturers. They spoon in the sugar to increase shelf-life and palatability (Eve’s temptation).

I know how hard it is to resist sweet stuff, and harder still to give up. Perhaps fructose is hardest of all, being so sweet and stealthy. Our gut absorbs it more rapidly as we become used to it, and it doesn’t suppress the hunger hormone (ghrelin) as glucose does. We get hooked, without being satisfied.

When we were introduced to tea and coffee as children our ration was a measly half-teaspoon of sugar to make them more palatable. As soon as we started savoring the beverages, mother weaned us off the sugar, and a few weeks later the sweetness was so repellent that if we sipped Dad’s tea by mistake it made us heave. It took much longer to adjust him to unsweetened drinks. In that age, when sweetness was well-regarded in every way, children could surprise visiting aunts and uncles by teasing them: “We are teatotal, and saving our sugar ration for chocolate!”

It is now cool to cut sugar and worry about fructose, and the stigma is sticking. Robert Lustig has over five million viewers for his YouTube diatribe against fructose, and Michelle Obama was quoted as saying,”Our kids don’t choose to make food products with tons of sugar and sodium in supersized portions, and then to have those products marketed to them everywhere they turn.” We must stop blaming the fat boys and girls in class for being gluttons. With choices made for them and sweet temptations at every turn, they are casualties of a food and drinks industry focused on annual financial performance. And since the FDA is unlikely to regulate sugar in foods, the sweet tide continues to rise.

High fructose corn syrup is gradually replacing sugar from cane and beet because it is so cheap. Produced by industrial hydrolysis of starch, HFCS55 and HFCS42 are the main products for foods and beverages, while HFCS90 finds specialty uses. The number represents the percentage, so the fructose hit in HFCS is similar to 50 in granulated pantry sugar. There are important differences, however, in the source, process, farm acreage, economic and environmental impacts of subsidized corn for HFCS.

While HFCS is regarded as a new dietary demon, we have been exposed to fiendish fructose for eons, although not in any quantity until recent generations. It is unavoidable, but lower exposure through smaller serving sizes, home cooking, dilution of fruit juices, etc. can be managed over time because there is no physical addiction to sugar. Perhaps it will become the new tobacco.

Animal studies show that it would take an impossibly large serving of fructose to kill us, but that doesn’t deny a toxicity that is cumulative and insidious over time. Even the most benign substances that life depends on, like water and oxygen, can harm us when we are overexposed to them.

I imagine a naïve man visiting the seaside for the first time. He sets up his deckchair on the beach at the low water mark so his toes are wetted by a gentle ripple at the ocean edge. Two hours later, he is enjoying the warm water washing around his calves while he is engrossed in an anthology of Robert Browning. When five more hours have gone by, the soothing water is up to his waist and the open book flops on his chest at the Paracelsus poem as he dozes off. But after ten hours, a wave splashing his face wakens him, but too late to swim back.

Perhaps the metaphor is too strong, but Paracelsus would argue otherwise. He was a sixteenth century doctor and the father of toxicology. A great deal of nonsense has been attributed to him, but he rightly pointed out that “the poison is in the dose.”

Next Post: Virginia Nature Journal for January

Posted in Biomedical | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Who knows about Fructose?

Sweet and Sickly

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Roger Gosden

Everything in moderation, including moderation. That’s Wilde … but did he really mean everything, including sugar, or was Oscar teasing us? What would he say since we consume immoderate amounts of the sweet stuff? And does it matter anyway?

granulated sugar

Sugar for a man-year

Some twenty years ago, I asked my students in Edinburgh to keep a food diary for their physiology class. Two weeks later they calculated their daily average rations of protein, fat, carbs, and micronutrients. Some of the young men consumed half of their carbs as sugar—equivalent to a 3 lb bag (1.4 kg) every week—mainly in candies, cakes, sodas, juices, bread, processed foods, and, of course, ad libitum volumes of beer. At that rate they swallowed four tons of refined sugar in a lifetime, contributing over 20 % to their total calories. The women consumed rather less of everything, but some were nonetheless so shocked that they abruptly changed their food choices, and sugar was first for the axe.

Scotland has been the land of “bread and buns” since Greenock became a Sugaropolis on the River Clyde. Ships docking after plying the Atlantic trade route from the West Indies provided a bustling trade that made sugar cheap enough for everyone to afford to excess. You can find it added to most things on your pantry and fridge shelves—from apple juice to zucchini in cans—often unnecessarily or excessive. Sugar consumption boomed throughout much of the Western World, and there was hardly ever a whimper of reproach.

Why would anyone protest? Isn’t a sweet gift a token of love? Parents, friends, and guests would buy candies, chocolate, ice cream, and candy floss (“candy cotton”) for us children, and more recently (if only in Scotland), deep fried Mars bars with a whopping 1,000 sweet, greasy calories. We were told that candy was good because it “gave us energy” (as if we were not hyperkinetic enough), and no one accused the gift-bearer of harming children. It was good for school dentists too, who labored like road workers inside our gaping mouths with jackhammers and caterpillar excavators. Ever since Queen Elizabeth I smiled a row of blackened stumps, “British teeth” have been synonymous with crumbling ruins for North American dentists.

Raw Mars bar before deep frying

Raw Mars bar before deep frying

Apart from the black mark of caries, ‘sweetness’ has resonated in our language for centuries with everything wholesome and beautiful— a sweet girl/ boy/ spirit/ victory/ life/ air/ scent/ friendship.  And Hamlet’s mother in her adieu, “Sweet to the sweet, farewell.”

Sweetness and sugar are interchangeable and both sound positive in almost every way, including financially. Sugar futures are safe bets for investors because the commodity reaches multiple markets—food, drink, fuel. And when Great Grandpa Francis took a retirement job as chairman of the International Sugar Council he was in a sweet spot. Harrowing memories of slave labor had faded, and there were none of the modern worries about environmental and nutritional impacts.

Neither did our doctors ever condemn a sweet tooth, as far as I can remember. However, unknown to us and yet not far from home there was a maverick fighting a single-handed battle against sugar interests.

John Yudkin

A book pulled from the dustbin

John Yudkin (1910- 1995), a London professor of physiology, published Pure, White and Deadly in 1972 (Sweet and Dangerous in the USA). The title reads like an Agatha Christie arsenic plot, but his book claimed that sugar is a slow poison, and that did not endear him to his profession or the industry. They strenuously barred him from guest lectureships and expert panels, although with typical British understatement, he wrote that, “relations with one or two friends in industry have occasionally become rather strained.” He also had the rare distinction of his book being condemned even before it was published: “(this book) is science fiction … and for your dustbin” (The World Sugar Research Organization).  The criticism must have pained him, because he was a “jolly man” according to one of my colleagues.

If World Sugar represented the bitter enemy in industry, Ancel Keys at the University of Minnesota was his bête noire in academia (blogpost December 21, 2014). After President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a series of heart attacks in 1955, American epidemiologists focused on the growing epidemic of heart disease, and Dr. Keys led the campaign against saturated dietary fat and for lowering blood cholesterol. Keys made the front cover of Time magazine and leaves a legacy of official dietary advice and food choices in our supermarkets.

Yudkin was a rare critic of Keys’ famous Seven Countries study of health and diet, and much else that claimed to prove a case against animal fat. He argued that the choice of countries was arbitrary, and sometimes the link with disease and obesity was stronger with sugar than fat. Moreover, the Canadian Inuit and African Masai subsisted on high fat diets (>50% of calories) consisting of meat, blood, blubber, and milk without developing heart disease, or at least until they adopted a Western diet. It was a similar story for Sephardic Jews before and after migration from Yemen to Israel. And the acclaimed Mediterranean diet, which is poor in ‘bad fats’ and rich in ‘good’ ones, happens to be low in sugar.

Rather accusingly, he said the low fat bandwagon was based on the elementary error of assuming that a correlation proves causation, and after it started rolling it was propelled by vested interests. As far as I know, he never met its architect, Ancel Keys, which was probably merciful because they might have come to blows, verbally if not worse. The bitterness went deeper than an esoteric tiff between academics because Keys had brought round his government, much of the medical profession, and the food industry to his cause. If he was wrong, there was blood on his hands—bad dietary advice to the nation would fail to roll back the tide of heart disease, and this has not happened after fifty years. As if to rub salt in a wound, Yudkin showed the correlation with disease is better for TV ownership, which is not as ironic as first sight. Heart disease is associated with all the hallmarks of affluence—sedentary lifestyle, obesity, smoking, fatty and sugary diets. The story is complex.

Perhaps he deliberately exaggerated as prophets are wont to do. He had to struggle to get attention from a profession and authorities who had turned their backs on him. Not only did he single out sugar as a chief cause of the triad of heart disease, obesity, and adult-type diabetes, but claimed it might be responsible for a mixed bag of gout, diverticulitis, dermatitis, duodenal ulcers, vision problems, and even cancer. In claiming sugar was the bogeyman of so many ailments he gave opponents a better chance to ridicule him. He wasn’t taken seriously until after his death, when another outsider stepped forward to carry the baton.

Gary Taubes in a New York Times magazine article (July, 2002) asked, What if fat doesn’t make you fat? Like his predecessor, he thought the triad was more likely caused by hormonal changes.

When glucose is absorbed into the bloodstream it stimulates insulin secretion from the pancreas. Insulin keeps glucose in check by a ‘handshake’ with a receptor on cells that opens a gate for glucose to enter where it is burnt for energy or stored as fats, to excess if sugar and insulin remain high. How the metabolic balancing act leads to a spectrum of disease is still being worked out, but its disorders seem to be related to the aging process. While studying worms in her lab at the University of California, Cynthia Kenyon found that insulin-like genes switched on by a sugary diet shorten their lifespan. After her discovery, she switched to a low glycemic diet.

Mother’s rule at the meal table was wiser than she knew. My brothers and I regarded the savory course as something to struggle through before we were rewarded with a sweet dessert. We were never allowed to reverse the order. The protein and fat lying heavy in our stomachs when the sugar came down the chute delayed gastric emptying, slowing its path into the small intestine for absorption and curbing a rush of glucose into the blood. Likewise, she forbad candy between meals, which avoids an unnecessary glucose spike, although her rationale was to dodge the dentist.

Yudkin also admitted struggling with a sweet tooth when young and an expanding waistline in mid-life. He slimmed by switching to a low-carb diet, which was a long time before we heard about the Atkins diet. But he wasn’t the pioneer of low carbs; that credit belongs to a Victorian Londoner, who, as a coffin-maker, knew something about corpulence. William Banting (1796-1878) found a low-carb diet helped him to slim, and he broadcast his discovery in a book that sold well, if not in medical circles. By an odd twist of history, one of his descendants won the Nobel Prize in 1923 for the discovery of insulin. Banting’s formula was close to the modern paleo diet, which I will return to in another blogpost.

Yudkin might chuckle now that sugar is portrayed as the new tobacco. You know the climate of science has changed when America’s First Lady and Dr. Oz have taken theories on board, even if the originator is forgotten.

But how could so many experts be so wrong for so long? Science is the most objective path to knowledge, but still a human endeavor. When a complicated case is heard in the court of science the judgment depends not only on the evidence presented but on the outcome of a clash between the prosecutor and defending attorney. Ancel Keys would have made a very persuasive trial lawyer and, more importantly, nutritional science makes hard cases.

Nutrition has been called kitchen science as one of the softer life sciences. It may look like a pure, white meringue with a hard crust, but squeeze it and you find a soft, gooey center. The more complicated the subject the greater the uncertainty, and the chemical complexity of food is compounded by the genetics and lifestyles of diners. And unlike testing a new drug, it is almost impossible for a study to strictly control the diet of its subjects long enough to reveal divergences in health. Consequently, we have a smorgasbord of slimming diets and food fads which are hard to prove or dismiss.

I favor Michael Pollan’s commonsense philosophy: “Eat food/ Not too much/ Mostly vegetables” (In Defense of Food). He applauds food that is not highly processed, farming practices with environmental integrity, and diets based on moderate food choices that reduce glycemic carbs. But it may not have appealed to Oscar Wilde who loved sweetmeats, and his father, Dr. Sir William Wilde, made his fortune in the sugar industry.

Next Post: Who knows about Fructose?

Posted in Biomedical | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sweet and Sickly

Where the Bee Sucks

Posted on December 25, 2014 by Roger Gosden

There are compensations of being cooped up indoors in wintertime. Bilbo Baggins looked forward to the long evenings in his hole at Bag End when he could relax in an armchair toasting his feet in front of a blazing fire. It’s a time of greater idleness and harder to rouse oneself even for a few steps from a comfort zone to the pantry for a snack. And bee colonies are likewise.

As the outside temperature falls below freezing, they huddle deep inside their hive to maintain a remarkable 90 °F. (32°C.). The workers who labored so hard on warm days earlier in the year are now idlers that rarely bother to snack, and no longer share their precious honey stores with drones that died off in the fall. The queen is at the quiet center of the bee-ball. She has stopped laying eggs, and won’t resume until February when the colony must expand rapidly for the coming nectar flow.

honeycomb

Cosy-up in the comb

Honey stores gradually run down over the cold season. On warm days, a few workers head out to forage for the few hours before sundown, but it is a risky business because if nectar and pollen are scarce the flights may have a negative energy balance. Bee colonies often perish from starvation at the end of winter, just a few days or weeks before food is plentiful again.

The beekeeper who stole most of the honey hoarded last summer must replace it. Trading sugar for honey seems good to him. But the sugar-water that was welcome in warmer months needs lots of energy from beating wings to evaporate it, and can increase the danger of condensation inside the hive. So we give candy to the bees, and why not at Christmas?

On a warm Christmas Day like today there was no danger of chilling the bee-ball when I lifted the inner cover to check the girls. I took a bar of candy out of Santa’s sack and rested it on the frames of empty honeycomb. The candy was home-made by boiling concentrated sugar with a few drops of essential oils until it caramelized and set into solid bars. It’s toffee for bees. A few lethargic workers crawled from their warm place to inspect the treat. Last year, I tested whether they could tell the difference between refined sugar and non-caloric artificial sweetener, because some people find it difficult. Of course bees aren’t so easily fooled. They know that real sugar is vital for survival, but it’s a different story for our species.

Next Post: Pure and Poisonous

A Merry Christmas to my readers

Posted in Animalia | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Where the Bee Sucks